For More Information
- Online Resources from the University of Houston
- Digital Storytelling Book
- The Elements of Digital Storytelling site does an excellent job of explaining the fundamentals of multimedia development. This site is a valuable guide for understanding the taxonomy of digital storytelling. This site also offers an analysis of current practices, a clearinghouse of effects research, a showcase of innovative story forms, and includes a forum for discussion.
- This ElectronicPortfolio site offers a number of great resources for digital storytelling in education. Among its features is a “tour of the tools” which details useful software and hardware for audio, image, and video editing on both Mac and PC platforms. The FAQ section is especially helpful in answering your questions. Teachers will love the simple and effective lesson plans on how to prepare a digital storytelling workshop.
- Meg’s Digital Storytelling Resources site contains an excellent collection of digital story sites and examples. Meg also offers exciting resources on blogs and information on her extensive presentations including keynotes speeches, breakouts, workshops, and classroom guidance.
- The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling site is a comprehensive website that includes simple and understandable information on creating digital stories from beginning to end. In its follow-along-style, this site will walk you through creating goals and objectives, getting started, looking at examples and tools, creating your story, and finally to creating grading rubrics. The site also offers a list of additional resources.
- DigiTales’ stylish and well-designed site details digital story-making tools for Macs, PCs, voiceovers, and even ones just for kids. Its resources include articles, books, image galleries, sound and music sources, eLearning tutorials, workshop possibilities, and sample stories.
- The First Monday site is a theoretical paper discussing how collaborative and group-based activities can promote positive student behavior. Specifically, the author, “hypothesizes that online forums and virtual communities, including message boards, Weblogs and instant messaging software (IM), allow children important spaces to share ideas and feelings, discuss issues and projects, ask and answer each other’s questions, and promote a prosocial spirit.
- Tech Head Stories contains a large collection of links to various digital storytelling resources. The site also provides useful information about information design, content strategy, and digital ephemera. Story links are categorized into key digital, educational programs, research, tools, story sites, archives, electronic games, interactive environments, memorial journals, interactive and hypertextual fiction, corporate, photo journals, personal journals, travel journals, role-playing journals, teenage journals, community projects, online comics, animation, tests, and more.
- Helen Graham gives tips about how you can preserve your family’s heritage by recording family members’ oral history.
- Telling Their Stories: Oral History Archives Project ”Read Watch Listen” to this amazing site that captures the personal stories of Holocaust survivors and refugees, WWII Camp liberators, and Japanese internees. All interviews were conducted by high school students who have translated the stories into segmented text and video clips.
- Heirloom Stories - Who better to tell stories than those who have lived to see the most. This site inspires older generations to record their stories so that in hundreds of years people with their genes will be able to read their thoughts. The site provides sample stories, writing tips, and online publication services. Visitors can subscribe to the Harnessmaker's Son Newsletter and receive a chapter from the author’s own story every month by e-mail.
- Creative Narrations (Boston) This site features numerous narrative digital stories ranging from personal life accounts, community conversations, and explorations of history. The sample videos show how videos can be used for education, outreach, and fundraising. The site also provides information about custom-made workshops for those who would like hands-on training.
- Digital Storytelling in the Classroom- Tom Banaszewski details step-by-step how he inspired his fourth and fifth grade students to find fun in writing. In Project Place, he asked his students to write about a place they felt comfortable and safe. Pictures were added and each student created their own digital story about their special place. Place Project demonstrates “how technology can be instrumental in the perennial student struggle to find voice, confidence, and structure in their writing.” The site also features wonderful iMovie tips created just for teachers.
- Kids’ Vid is an “instructional website to help students and teachers use video production in class to support project based learning.” Resources include scripting, editing, making the video and details about showing your work. The site also hosts a digital story competition for K-12 students.
- Digital Stories by Students and Teachers features a showcase of digital stories created by students and teachers. The three types of videos are educational, fiction, and nonfiction. A wonderful resource section details tools for editing video, audio, and photos. Visitors can also submit their own stories.
- Capture Wales Digital Storytelling - The idea of this site is to showcase the splendor of Wales. Videos created by people from Wales during a six day workshop are presented. A select number of videos are aired on BBC television. Workshop information is provided.
- The Center for Digital Story Telling is a non-profit training and consulting organization dedicated to help individuals and companies create digital stories through their custom workshops. The workshops’ aim is to teach participants how to create a 3-5 minute digital story. The context of their workshops covers education, oral and local history, faculty and staff development, K-12 program curricula, and more.
- Fraynework Digital Storytelling is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating digital stories about indigenous people around the globe in an effort to promote education and compassion. Fraynework produces CD-ROMs, interactive websites, videos, and more. The organization also offers consultation and training services.
- Digital Family Stories is a wonderful resource website dedicated to preserving family history. Resources available include information on digital equipment, software vendors, production tools (text, graphic, movie, & web editors categorized by user level), and publication media.
- Telling Lives - England BBC Digital Storytelling explores the uniqueness of its regions by hosting a large collection of stories created by and for the people of the UK. The stories are produced in workshops available around the country. Finished works can be viewed on the web and on BBC television.
- These Stories in These Pictures: An Easy Guide to Storytelling from the Pictures We Collect in Our Lives - The Canadian Film Centre puts everything you want to know about creating a storyline in one place. This simple and marvelous website explains how to create a true or fictional story using your photo collection. Wonder elements of this website include structural advice and personal touches that you can incorporate into your story. Examples include expectation reversal, using metaphoric references, and effective pacing.
- Dana Atchley's Next Exit provides consulting and storytelling workshops to corporations and senior level executives helping them to tell their stories by applying the rich media techniques of digital storytelling called emotional brand-building.”
- The Dostal Project is a wonderful example of family recorded history. See how one man chronicled his family history from his great-great grandparents to himself. The site includes written transcripts and 15 short stories, each including narration and dozens of photographs.
- StoryCorps seeks to record history from everyday people. This site features a large collection of audio stories (mp3s). Selected interviews are also broadcast each Friday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition.
- Photobus: Daniel Meadows Adventures in Documentary, 1973-2004 - This site features wonderful and engaging examples of digital storytelling. Examples include a biography of the author’s parents and local history. Included is a comprehensive digital story tutorial with many helpful resources and information.
- Kent, WA VisFest features an in-depth overview of using various kinds of technology in K-12 classrooms, including a review of digital storytelling techniques and practical tips.
- Edutopia Video Library features hundreds of videos created in K-12 classrooms, as well as tools for teachers on technology integration, assessing technology integration, and curriculum guides.
- Digital Storytelling Cookbook uses a cookbook metaphor to explain digital storytelling and guide users through the movie-creation process.
- Dr. Alice Christie’s Digital Media Resources for Teachers offers an extensive list of links for videos made in K-12 classrooms, tips and techniques, planning and assessment, professional development, free online resources, and various articles.
- The Center for Digital Storytelling provides resources and promotes workshops for the proliferation of storytelling through video. It is devoted to helping people of all ages tell their stories through new media. The Center is particularly concerned with writing development and helping people learn to tell their stories in a profound way.
- Principles and Methods from the Center for Digital Storytelling this page outlines five key points of storytelling -- everyone has a powerful story, listening is important, there is no formula for a great story, creativity is a human activity, and fusing technology and storytelling is very powerful.
- Tech Head Stories offers links to other digital storytelling Web sites, digital storytelling educational programs, books and research about digital storytelling, tools and resources, and MANY examples of how media can be used to tell stories.
Works Cited
"Digital Storytelling." Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling. University of Houston, 2011. Web. 22 May 2011. <http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/video.html>.