Digital Stories

What are digital stories?
What’s involved in producing a digital story?
How to produce a digital story?
Tools for creating digital stories
Digital stories training sessions
Examples of digital stories produced by Victorian Schools
Grants available to produce your school’s digital story

What are digital stories?

Digital stories combine the art of traditional story telling with the use of new technologies - making stories more compelling, educative, engaging and creative. Digital storytelling allows students and teachers to tell their own stories by using simple multimedia software to combine the use of video, photos, art and audio (music, narration and/or sound effects) into a single presentation.

What’s involved in producing a digital story?

The process of making a digital story involves:

Storyboarding - a process of roughing out the subject matter in a logical sequence, often in sketch form (Imagination, inquiry and critical thinking skills)
Script development - to establish the narration (voice over) and/or dialogue between characters in the story (Creativity and oral skills)
Digital production e.g. video taping or image/photo capture - using either a digital video camera or a digital still camera (Technology literacy)
Editing the video/image sequences together (Editing skills); and
Determining the most appropriate way(s) to deliver the story to your audience(s) (Reflection and presentation skills)

How to produce a digital story?

The following information titled ‘Digital Storytelling Basics’ was produced by Sunshine Primary School.

Digital storytelling allows students to create stories through the multiple mediums of digital imagery, text, voice, sound, music, video and animation.

What makes a good digital story?

A Point of View - what you intend the viewer to learn / understand, What message are you trying to convey?
A Dramatic Question - A good story has a “hook” that will hold the attention of the audience until the story is over.
Emotional Content - A story that deals with our emotions, will help the audience maintain their attention.
The Gift of Your Voice - The way you use tone in your voice can impact the story you tell. Slow, Fast, Loud, Soft. The tone of the storyteller’s voice provides the drama and sets the mood. Do you need voice? Will music tell the story for you? Caution: You don’t want your final project to sound like you are reading a script!
Soundtrack - Music sets the mood. The goal is to match the music to the story. Instrumental music, without words, works the best to create an appropriate mood. The focus should be the narration and the music should support and enhance the storytelling. Use only copyright-free music!
Pacing - Changing the pace of the story can be very effective. The narrative can have pauses. The music can change tempo. The images can be set to enter at different rates of speed. Changing pace allows the audience to: concentrate, think, and maintain interest.

Website resources:

DigiTales (www.digitales.us/index.php)
Center for Digital Storytelling - (www.storycenter.org)
Digital Storytelling (www.electronicportfolios.com/digistory/)
Australian Centre for Moving Images (ACMI) (www.acmi.net.au/digitalstorytelling.jsp)

Tools for creating digital stories

Microsoft Photo Story 3.1 - is a free application that allows users to create a show and tell presentation from their digital photos. The software allows adding narration, effects, transitions and background music to create a Windows Media Video movie file with pan and zoom effects.

Kahootz - All Victorian government schools received Kahootz 3.0 at the beginning of Term 2, 2008! The Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF) developed Kahootz to provide students with dynamic tools to create, share and collaborate with digital curriculum content. With a range of exciting new features Kahootz 3.0 provides students with even more ways to create amazing stories, inventions, habitats, games, movies and soundtracks.

Microsoft MovieMaker 2.1 - is video creating/editing software that is included in recent versions of Microsoft Windows. It contains features such as effects, transitions, titles/credits, audio track, timeline narration, and Auto Movie.

Microsoft PowerPoint - is a presentation program and part of the Microsoft Office system that runs on Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS computer operating systems. In PowerPoint, text, graphics, movies, and other objects are positioned on individual pages or "slides". The slides can be animated, and voice/sounds can be added to create a story, games or movies.

iPhoto - is a software application made by Apple Inc. exclusively for their Mac OS X operating system. It is part of the iLife suite of applications and comes bundled with every new Macintosh computer. iPhoto can import, organize, edit, print and share digital photos. It is often compared to Google's Picasa and Adobe's Photoshop Album.

Digital stories training sessions

For more information on Kahootz training in Victoria please refer to the Kahootz website. The Australian Centre for Moving Images (ACMI) offers teacher training in the production of digital stories. Training sessions are normally held at ACMI, in Melbourne CBD. For more information on 2008 workshops please refer to: http://www.acmi.net.au/learn_mystory.aspx

Examples of digital stories produced by Victorian Schools

Digital stories produced by Victorian school students can be found on the epotential website and type “digital stories” into the search.