Culminating Statement
I believe that Digital Storytelling is yet to reach its potential popularity, especially within the classroom. I think that Digital Storytelling should be incorporated into the syllabus, as it has the potential to cover many different areas.
By creating a digital story, you are able to include different forms of digital content, which may create better interest for students in the classroom, therefore increasing their motivation for learning.
As Freidus and Hlubinka states “Digital storytelling for reflective practice is a valuable, transformative tool for personal, professional, organizational, and community development” It is certainly a valuable tool, which may be used in a multitude of ways, other then that in the classroom.
Digital storytelling provides an appealing and very engaging learning experience. It brings together many different ideas of writing, technology and emotion. David S. Jakes and Joe Brennan discuss that “The process of digital storytelling provides one of the best learning experiences available to students”. Jakes and Brennan also discusses that the process of Digital Storytelling can also provide a high-quality learning experience because the learning experience honours the writing process first. The “inclusion of technology into the process represents a “value-added” approach where the inclusion of the technology extends the learning experience beyond what could be accomplished without technology”. Although a students may be able to write a well structured and presented story, their stories my always be that much better with using technology.
I wanted to end my culminating statement, with a quote I found whilst researching Digital Storytelling. It is a quote from Dr. Mark Kann, that I feel is well suited to teachers especially who feel differently about Digital Storytelling, and feel it isn’t that important.
“It seems to me that at some point, multimedia expression is going to be like writing: it’s something you don’t leave college without. Kids are very sophisticated in navigating on computers and surfing the Internet. I think pretty soon they’re going to have to be as sophisticated in expressing themselves using the media.”
- Dr. Mark Kann
Chair, USC Political Science Department
