The New Way to Tell Your Story:
Think of the reasons for traditional storytelling and soon you can start to imagine the use of digital storytelling in all aspects of today's world. The business person might use a digital storytelling website to create an advertisement for a new product, to develop a commercial with colleagues as they collaborate online from different parts of the country or to share new ideas through the use of a story.
A family that wants to share stories of grandparents; childhood memories, or document family vacations could use Storyjumper.com to accomplish this task. Communities that want to remember a remarkable citizen, express gratitude to its members or just simply remember a recent event could use digital storytelling to share their story.
Impact on Education:
In education, digital storytelling can impact teaching, learning and research. "Like traditional storytelling, digital storytelling helps to build conceptual skills like understanding a narrative and using inductive reasoning to solve problems, but the creation of digital stories also requires the creator to build technology skills through the use of software and other tools" (How Digital Storytelling, 2009).
Storyjumper.com allows teachers to create classroom editions. By doing so, teachers can manage and review students' stories, allow kids to share stories from school and home, as well as have privacy control over their students' information. Using a website such as Storyjumper.com allows students many benefits. It offers a creative outlet for students. It also aids those students who have difficulty putting their ideas on paper. When you give a child a piece of paper and ask him or her to write a story, some can take off running while others will stare at the piece of paper for the remainder of the class unless the teacher intervenes. Storyjumper.com is designed for all children. Once the classroom is set up, students can log in and start a story from scratch or they can use a storystarter template to guide them in the right direction.
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| A Class Set-Up Example |
The website also provides a graphic organizer, very familiar to elementary students, that allows them to plan for their stories before they begin working on the internet. This organizer could be completed independently, in partners or even in groups depending on the purpose of the assignment and the individual needs of the classroom. "Creating graphic organizers for their own digital stories can help students identify the structure in their own as well as others' texts" (Royer & Richards, 2008). Using these can help "integrate the visual as well as the verbal flow of the story" (Royer & Richards).
In addition, teachers could select characters from a recently read classroom story and encourage the children to create a story that solves the character's problem in a different way. Students could work together to solve the character's problem and as a result develop an understanding of problem/solution as well as develop their creative writing skills. Storyjumper.com could also be used to tell nonfiction stories about famous people in history, or facts about a recent topic in Science or Social Studies. On the website, students can upload photos from the computer, a flickr account, or from public photos on flickr.com.
Collaboration:
Storyjumper.com encourages collaboration from the beginning. Students can work together to brainstorm ideas for a great story. The website suggests that teachers break the class into different groups, allow the students to begin completing the graphic organizer and then switch the organizers among the groups and let each group finish another group's story plans. Also, once students begin writing the story on the computer, students can work in collaborative pairs or each student can complete one page of a class story. Finally, the stories can be shared with family and friends at home through an e-mail and with the use of a given password shared only among family members for privacy.
Communication:
In terms of communicating information and ideas to a global audience, Storyjumper.com does have an option to add the story to the Storyjumper.com's library of stories and make it a public story. Students can even select a box that allows others to copy, change or use their ideas from their published stories. This option would allow for students to share their published work to a global audience.
Software/Hardware:
