Powerful learning with digital storytelling

Digital storytelling is writing for the digital age. It builds on the essential skill of choosing the right words with the addition of visuals, mood-enhancing music, and passionate voice narration. From small moment stories to Ken-Burn’s-style biographies and behavior-changing public service announcements, digital storytelling helps connect students to content learning while helping them find and use their voice.

"Designing and communicating information requires students to deepen their understanding of content while increasing visual, sound, oral language, creativity, and thinking skills." --Bernajean Porter

Support the ideation, research, and writing process

Digital storytelling is engaging and should be student-driven, but teacher support and instruction are essential throughout the process. Draw from Wixie's Curriculum Activities and Design Templates libraries to find and assign scaffolds that help students brainstorm ideas and research information.

Students will also benefit from templates that help them organize ideas for more effective writing compositions and communication.

What can digital storytelling look like?

Digital storytelling goes beyond retelling and experience and restating information. It draws on the power of the author's perspective and humanity’s long tradition of storytelling for powerful communication.

And a digital approach doesn’t make it more complex. Yes, crafting a movie-style trailer for a favorite book takes time and effort, but language learners and emerging writers can get started by simply adding voice narration to a single image to make an experience come alive.

In the Primary Grades

Use sentence scaffolds and simple structures to support students who are emerging writers (and often emerging readers too). For example, you could start with an I go and I see sight word story that takes advantage of previous work with sentence strips.

You can also ask young students to add a single word or short phrase to a sentence starter for a fun adaptation of your favorite pattern story. Wixie includes a folder of story adaptation templates to make it easy to get started.

In the Elementary Grades

As your students grow in skills and capabilities, digital storytelling is a powerful way to build their narrative, expository and persuasive writing abilities. For example, writing a personification story digitally means students can literally give voice to an object (voice recording) and make it move (animation).

Digital storytelling also helps students avoid a direct copy-paste of information. For example, ask them to craft a fictitious interview with an animal, artifact, or book character. Instead of a book review, which often ends up as a simple summary, ask them to create a book trailer that shares the conflict of a story in a way that persuades the viewer to read the story.

In the Middle Grades

Wixie makes it easy to share writing through a range of products. As students grow in ability and independence, make them responsible for choosing the best medium for their digital storytelling no matter the subject or topic.

Secondary students are passionate and idealists. Have them create digital stories that entertain, raise awareness and change minds.

Ready to get started?

Digital storytelling takes work and isn't easy, but the results are worth the effort. Use the resources, templates, and ideas in the guides to help you take advantage of this powerful approach.

We can't wait to watch your student's digital stories!