Digital Storytelling

Digital Storytelling

          When we hear the word storytelling, we immediately imagine lots of children sitting in the classroom around the teacher and the teacher enthusiastically reading the story for them. Digital story-telling is a little bit another type of storytelling that teachers are unable to imply without technology.

According to Robertson, (2010) Digital storytelling is the art of combining storytelling with some mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video, and music to communicate information about a specific theme or topic. So here we combine new and old: technology and traditional storytelling.

As in Armenia it is less developed and almost not implemented in an EFL classroom I cannot say how well it can be accepted by the Armenian students, but one think I know for sure that is Armenian students need more collaborative and cooperative projects which digital storytelling can supply.

Using digital storytelling in an EFL classroom is very engaging and inspiring. Most often children interview their parents and relatives, come to the classroom discuss the scripts and make their group digital storytelling project together with their partners.

According to Robertson, (2010), students who work together on long-term projects are less likely to be absent. They also develop cooperation and communication skills, practice problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, and improve their test scores. When students integrate technology into their projects, these benefits increase.

For me as a teacher will be pleasure to teach my students with new technology and tools, besides I thing that students in Armenia will also enjoy learning how to make their own stories and have something to remember that they will include there and of course keep it for future because technologies change very quickly and may be some day people may forget about such kind of teaching technology tool as digital storytelling.