Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling is a wonderful use of 21st century technology to help students experience a deeper level of learning. Who doesn't love a good story? Humans have been telling stories through words, pictures, dances, myths, and print for thousands of years. Stories connect us. Stories teach us. Stories challenge us. Digital storytelling is merely the most modern iteration of this long standing practice. It includes the use of videos, pictures, voice recordings, music, and other art forms to creatively communicate with others. (4 C’s for the win!)

Studies show clear benefits for digital storytelling. Multimodal learning tends to be more memorable, more exciting, more engaging, and more impactful than unimodal learning. The mere repetition of information helps us understand and remember information better, but when that repetition comes in sensory-heavy, experiential learning, students are far more likely to relate to the information and make deeper personal connections. These benefits only compound when the students themselves create these digital stories. 

The author of this article does a wonderful job explaining benefits and specifics of digital storytelling. In one example, they suggest having students write from the perspective of a misunderstood decimal point. How wonderful! I can certainly imagine that my students would never forget to line up their decimal points again after having humanized the symbol and created an entire multimedia story about its woes.

I often use little songs and mental images like this across my curriculum when I’m teaching. Right now, TikTok sounds are very popular for middle schoolers. The use of the sounds create a new context for the sound which is widely understood on the app. Back a few years ago, I used this 2 second sound to teach my students the distribution property in mathematics. (“I like you. Have a cupcake. I like you. I have a cupcake.”)

I used this more recent sound to help my students understand that when they are working with two step algebra equations, they have to remove the “friend” (addition / subtraction) before “breaking up the couple” (multiplication / division). My heart fills with glee when I see their little forms bent over their desks looking at a new algebra problem and humming “do da do doo da do, move Steve…” 

I’ve also helped my students write their own songs to help them remember formulas for areas of shapes or definitions for math vocabulary. This kind of multimodal learning is certainly effective. Oftentimes, when my students have questions, all I have to do is tap a rhythm or hum a few notes for them to remember exactly what they need to do. Even though in the examples above I wasn’t showing the students the digital media, I was still using references to the digital media they were consuming at home, and it was effective. These are all great reasons why digital storytelling and multimodal learning are helpful.

Digital storytelling can have its pitfalls if used incorrectly, though. For example, if a teacher just plays video after video for students, studies show that students can apparently actually become less engaged and feel a decreased connection to the teacher and decreased motivation to learn.

However, even with the best intentions, digital storytelling can still backfire. Many times, creators take creative license with their content and add non-historical or non-accurate details for interest’s sake, this article points out. Unfortunately, students are prone to remember and assimilate this misinformation. Students have to be specifically told what is correct and incorrect, and sometimes that apparently isn’t enough. 

Recently, I had a wash of an afternoon with half of my students absent due to illness and extracurricular events. Instead of moving on with material, I put on the Disney cartoon version of Robin Hood. This movie is ridiculously inaccurate, but we had been studying Medieval Europe (King Richard the Lionheart, King (Prince) John, the signing of the Magna Carta, the love-hate relationship between the government and the church, etc.), so it fit. I made sure to point out many historical accuracies before and during the movie, but, despite the potential for them to remember some inaccurate details, I was pleased to see how my students were relating to the content. They drew connections to what we had been reading about, speculated on symbolism in the animation, and viscerally understood how disliked the “Phony King of England” was.

Nobody messes with Baby Skippy.

(By the way, when I was in middle school, we had some kind of project - I literally remember zero details - but my friends and I memorized, acted out, and recorded the entire first several scenes of this movie. When I played the movie for my students, I remembered most of the lines as well as the specific delivery of the lines even though I can't say I've seen the movie since then. That speaks volumes to this week's topic as well.)

Moving forward, we read about the formation of new religious orders, the difference between Monks and Friars (I was able to reference Friar Tuck from the movie), and some important nuns. The textbook absolutely robbed Hildegard of Bingen with a literal two sentence summary about her incredible life, so I threw in some extra multimedia learning experiences to help the kids remember her a little better for the future. We watched an educational cartoon-style video about her life and accomplishments, and then we listened to some of her musical compositions that have lasted almost a thousand years and are still being performed today! As we listened, the students made connections back to other information they had learned. For example, they noted that her music was written in Latin, the language of the learned and of the church and strikingly different than the Troubadour music we had listened and danced to. 

(Dancing and movement is another form of multimodal learning, and although I didn’t play the instructional video for my students, I used AI and YouTube as research tools to find accurate dances and teach myself so that I could teach them more succinctly.)

In conclusion, I think multimodal learning is wonderful, fun, engaging, and memorable for students. As always, I’m very choosy about how much I allow into my classroom, but even when I don’t bring it all the way into my classroom for whatever reasons, I am constantly pulling from my own multimodal learning to make my teaching more effective. I’m inspired by this week’s stimuli to provide more room for my students to create their own digital storytelling pieces. While time consuming, it is definitely the next step in incorporating this active and effective learning style in my classroom.

(Side note: I was unable to access the examples from the website link in our class, so I hope my reviews of my own multimedia choices have sufficed for this blog.)