Instructor: Joe Herz, MA Educational Technology - jherz@dominicancaonline.com

Digital Storytelling is the practice of using technology tools to help tell a meaningful and often heartfelt story. Digital stories are planned. They have a beginning, a middle and an end. The story itself is the most important ingredient. Technology tools add visual and auditory enhancements but the story itself is the key ingredient. Without a good story what you see and hear is fleeting. Merging a good story with even simple tech enhancements creates a memorable product.

As with traditional storytelling, most digital stories focus on a specific topic and contain a particular point of view. However, as the name implies, digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips, and/or music. Digital stories can vary in length, but most of the stories used in education typically last between 2 and 10 minutes. The topics used in digital storytelling range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one’s own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe, and literally, everything in between.