The Educational Goals & Objectives of Digital Storytelling

Hi All:

The University of Houston has laid out the educational goals and objectives of Digital Storytelling. Please see below an excerpt from their Web site: http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/educational_goals.html

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Educators at all levels can use Digital Storytelling in many ways, from introducing new material, to helping students learn to conduct research, synthesize large amounts of content and gain expertise in the use of digital communication and authoring tools. It also can help students organize these ideas as they learn to create stories for an audience, and present their ideas and knowledge in an individual and meaningful way.
Educational Goals of Digital Storytelling
Teachers can:

• Create a digital story for use as an anticipatory set or hook for a lesson;
• Enhance current lesson plans with the use of a digital story within a unit;
• Assign student-created stories which requires students to research a topic from a particular point of view.

Students can:

• Learn to use the Internet to research rich, deep content while analyzing and synthesizing a wide range of content;
• Develop communication skills by learning to ask questions, express opinions, construct narratives and write for an audience;
• Increase their computer skills using software that combines a variety of multimedia including: text, still images, audio, video and web publishing.

Educational Objectives of Digital Storytelling
Although not a comprehensive list, digitial storytelling can be used to:

• Appeal to the diverse learning styles of students by using Digital Storytelling as a presentation media;
• Generate interest, attention and motivation for the "digital generation" kids in our classrooms;
• Capitalize on the creative talents of your own students as they begin to research and tell stories of their own;
• Publish student work on the Internet for viewing and critiquing by others;
• Promote the accomplishment of cross-curricular academic standards and learning objectives.