Why is Writing Important?
While writing may not be the final product of a digital story, it is the pathway students must take to create it.
Writing is the primary tool used to plan and create a digital story. Writting their thoughts, even as brief as storyboarding, enables the students to clarify, analyse, synthetize and organize the information they will explore.
Media production is a great way to engage kids in writing in an authentic way. No matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, the future of digital storytelling will involve writing and conventional forms of literacy.
The writing skills that students employ in the process of creating their digital stories embrace many aspects of writing that are valued in school and the workplace. Digital stories compel students to synthesize creative writing and personal reflection with clarity and organization.
In the case of academic digital stories, writing is used to plan, script and create a story that demonstrates content area understanding.
Story mapping shows the emotional flow, while story boarding shows the flow of motion.
"Storyboarding," which is an excellent planning tool to use to chart the events of a story.
But while storyboarding charts a story's events, story mapping charts the essence of the story. Both are important, but they do very different things.
The story development process goes like this: idea/content -> story map -> storyboard -> script.
A story map typically fits on one page and takes the form of an annotated graphic that shows and explains the essential parts of a story.
Story mapping vs Storyboarding
Digital Storytelling as Communication Tool
Types of Stories
There are many kinds of stories and ways to classify stories.
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A storytelling essay that involves a personal reflection. A story told from the point of view of an object, a person, or personal point of view, where reflection is used to communicate feelings, emotions and personal opinion on the subject. This type of storytelling will rely on narative effects like tone, pause, tension, seed, as well as on visual impact via images/video that communicates not only information about the topic, but that is chosen to support the personal point of view.
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An academic or "unit of instruction" story. Stories about concepts, units or idea from any area of the curriculum, content reviews, HOT questions, introductory lessons on concepts. They combine the immediacy and power of story with reflective examples and practice to support content area understanding.
