Digital Storytelling: Bridging the Digital Divide

Generations evolve, technology is enhanced and society is conforming to meet the needs of all ages. For years, people have written stories on cave walls, slates, scrolls, and a variety of different types of paper. Today, we can watch stories come to life as they are written with voice and images through the new age of digital storytelling. The audience is captivated by the visual whereas stories used to be filled with nothing more than sounds coming from an author's voice. Digital storytelling uses technology to enhance an author's words and provide an audience with insight into detailed effects of words that truly can come to life. Research on digital storytelling provides its array of users with many tips, tools, and tutorials to bridge the digital divide.

Digital storytelling is a valuable tool for anyone, but especially classroom teachers. Students can find motivation in digital storytelling because current students are developing in an age of constant technology. At any grade level, students are recording the same stories on pencil and paper; however computers and digital storytelling give the students a variety of ways to share their work. This approach allows reluctant writers to express themselves and share their work with their peers regardless of the convention errors that may be evident in their written products. Digital storytelling must be presented to students in a way that the student know the purpose of tool and they are not distracted by all the "bells and whistles."

The most obvious use of digital storytelling is to engage and motivate student writers. The technology seems to integrate naturally with published writing pieces. The students can also use the same software to share information they learned and researched from other content areas. Individuals or small groups could research Native American groups and share the information learned or they could share the characteristics that they have learned about different types of rocks and minerals in science. In language arts, the class could do a unit comparing oral storytelling to reading written text. By recording stories, the students become fluent readers of a specific passage while also working on voice expression based on the tone and punctuation of the text. By integrating the visual arts with the content areas, the students' illustrations can be another showpiece that builds the confidences of learners with different strengths in Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences. The software encourages curiosity and students buying into each other's interests and projects so that all children are motivated to not only learn, but share their knowledge within their community of learners.

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