Digital storytelling involves using multimedia like photos, video, sound, and text to tell a story. It allows ordinary people to share their personal stories using digital tools. Digital stories are found in many contexts from classrooms to museums to social media. They help with skills like communication, problem solving, and time management. Some common types of digital stories include stories about relationships, travel adventures, accomplishments, and overcoming challenges. The process of digital storytelling involves selecting a topic, collecting resources, deciding on a purpose, storyboarding ideas, creating a 2-5 minute film, and sharing it online.

1. Bringing together your digital skills to impact others and yourself
DIGITAL STORYTELLING

2. DIGITAL STORYTELLING: WHAT IS IT?
• Digital Stories are multimedia movies that combine photographs, video, animation,
sound, music, text, and often a narrative voice.
• Its the new practice of ordinary people who use digital tools to tell their 'story'. Digital
stories often present in compelling and emotionally engaging formats, and can be
interactive.
• It is sometimes used to refer to film-making in general, and as of late, it has been used to
describe advertising and promotion efforts by commercial and non-profit groups.
• Digital stories can be found anywhere from the classroom, to integrate subject matter
with knowledge and skills from across the curriculum, to the board room, where they’re
used to establish a particular brand for a major corporation.
• You’ll find them anywhere online, from Twitter and Pinterest, to Instagram and Facebook,
to small film festivals such as Sundance, even featured during the SuperBowl.

3. EVERYONE HAS A STORY WORTH TELLING
" The (digital storytelling) project confirmed my belief that
everyone has a story about a place that is important to her or
him, and that by using multimedia to develop and share those
stories, we strengthen our understanding of our
communities.”
- Tom Banaszewski

4. BENEFITS OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING
" Digital stories help students with time management, problem
solving, communication skills and interpersonal qualities such
as teamwork, critical thought, information collection, data
interpretation, text and image analysis, synthesis and self-
evaluation."
- Carmen Gregori Signes

7. TYPES OF DIGITAL STORIES
• Digital Stories take on many shapes, and are found in many places:
• In museums, churches, corporate training, high school reunions, as Christmas presents,
and in classrooms (for those young and old).
• Digital stories may be used as an expressive medium within the classroom to integrate
subject matter with extant knowledge and skills from across the curriculum
• They can also be used to
• convince others of something that matters, to publicize a social injustice, to move
people to action
• build your business, share your vision or results, to establish brand identity
• capture the meaning from a travel adventure, or work in the community, to reflect on
personal growth
• tell your autobiography, or why you’re pursing a passion, to build history, to just build
your own sense of self.

8. SOME EXAMPLES OF DIGITAL STORIES ONLINE:
• Digital Storytelling in the Classroom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUZXBc6yRhU
• This is Why We’re Unhealthy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPTgsP8glY8
• The new ‘Post-Advertising’ approach is Storytelling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eubWYPhcEEo
• College Assignment/Expression of Creativity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Szc4Q2TKGY
• Film Festival Examples: Fully Immersive, Interactive Films Online: http://mashable.com/2012/01/31/digital-
storytelling/#ZERqYTqO.uqh
• Story Center: A Wide Collection of Stories: http://www.storycenter.org/stories
• Maricopa Community College Examples: https://mcli.maricopa.edu/storytelling

9. LETS FIND YOU A TOPIC…
Character Stories: It is deeply important to us how we love, are inspired by, want to recognize,
find meaning in our relationships to other people or pets.
Memorial Stories: Honoring and remembering people who have passed is an essential part of
the process of grieving -- how would you describe this person? Is there an event/incident that
best captures the character? What about them do/did you most enjoy? What lesson did they
give you? If you had something to say to them --that they may have never heard you say--
what would it be?
Adventure Stories: Travel is an invitation to challenge ourselves, to change our perspective, to
reassess. We often return from these experiences with personal realizations. Recounting our
travel stories is as much about sharing those realizations as sharing the sense of beauty or
interest in the place visited.
Accomplishment Stories: Stories about achieving a goal, like graduating from school. These
stories easily fit into the desire-struggle-realization structure of a classical story. They also
tend to be documented, so you might find it easy to construct a multimedia story. What was
the event's incidentals (time, place, etc)? With whom did you experience this event? What
there a defining moment? How did you feel during this event? What did you learn? How did
this event change your life?

10. FINDING A TOPIC, CONT…
Story About a Place in My Life: Story about your home, an ancestral home, a town, a park,
mountain, or forest you love, a restaurant, store or gathering place. Your insights into place
give us insight about your sense of values and connection to community. How would you
describe this place? With whom did you share this place? What experiences do you relate to
this place? Was there a defining experience at this place? What lessons about yourself do
you draw from your relationship to this place? If you have returned to this place, how has it
changed?
Story About What I Do: Story shaped by a job, a hobby or ongoing social commitment.
Poignancy often comes from looking at the familiar in a new way, with a new meaning. What
is your profession or interest? What experiences in your previous life prepared you fro this
activity? Was there an initial event that most affected your decision to pursue this interest?
Who influenced you in shaping your career, interest or skill in this area? How has profession
or interest affected your life as a whole? What has been the highlight or your
vocation/avocation?
Recovery Stories: Sharing the experience of overcoming a great challenge, like a health crisis
or a great personal obstacle, is the fundamental archetype in human story making. If you can
transmit the range of experience from descent, to crisis, to realization, you can always move
an audience.
[adapted from Joel Lambert Digital Storytelling: Capturing Lives, Creating Community; and Mustafa Sakarya]

13. GETTING STARTED: DEFINE, COLLECT, DECIDE
• 1. Select a topic for your digital story.
• 2. Create a folder on the desktop or Dropbox/Google Drive where you can store the materials
you find.
• 3. Search for image resources for your story, including: personal pictures, drawings,
photographs, maps, charts, etc. -Save these resources in your folder. Check for Copyright
friendly sources, or just give proper credit.
• 4. Try to locate audio resources such as music, speeches, interviews, and sound effects. -Save
these resources in your folder.
• 5. Try to find supporting informational content, which might come from web sites, word
processed documents, or PowerPoint slides. -Save these resources in your folder.
• 6. Finalize the purpose of your story. Are you trying to inform, convince, provoke, question?
• Storyboard your ideas into place. Write a script that will be used as narration in your digital
story AND provides the purpose and point of view you have chosen.

14. CREATING AND SUBMITTING YOUR FILM
• You will create a film 2-5 minutes in length. Briefer or longer, what really matters is the
quality of what you create.
• Be sure to include multiple digital modalities: images, text, audio, and video.
• If you get stuck, refer to the Powerpoint for content and ideas, see Blackboard for
technology tutorials, or contact me directly. I’m happy to help!
• After you save your film, you will upload it to YouTube. You can set privacy to your
preference, but be sure to at least allow me to access it directly with a link.
• Submit the YouTube link to me via Blackboard.
• You will then use that link to put your video on your Weebly Portfolio page. Look to ‘share’
and you’ll get the embed code that you’ll put into a new Weebly page.
• All steps are explained in our Blackboard content folder for this week.

15. FILM MAKING SOFTWARE
• iMovie is a good choice for Mac users who want to create digital stories. Comes installed
on Macs. MAC ONLY
• Windows Movie Maker is a video editing software application that has been included as
part of the Windows operating system since 2000. FOR PCs.
• We will use WeVideo as a suggested software, because it is available for free online, is
Mac and Windows compatible, and you can start your project on one computer and then
go to another computer and pick up right where you left off. It also saves automatically, so
fewer chances of losing your work.
• Go to WeVideo.com or other software, and see our Blackboard for link to various video
tutorials.