7 Elements of Digital Story-Telling

Digital story-telling is based on the idea of combining the art of telling stories with a variety of digital multimedia, such as images, audio, and video. Most digital stories include some combination of digital graphics, text, recorded audio narration, video, and music to offer information on a particular theme. Digital story-telling is a powerful tool which can be used in your classroom to enhance the learning environment for your students. There are seven main elements of digital story-telling, which are important to its overall success in the classroom. If you implement these elements into your digital story-telling lessons, then your are bound to have positive results. The seven elements of digital story-telling are outlined below:

1. Point of View: What is the author trying to say? From whose perspective is the story being told?
2. A Dramatic Question: A dramatic question is one that will be answered by the end of the story. This dramatic question leads to a resolution which may be predictable or may be a surprise.
3. Emotional Content: Serious issues that speak to us in a personal and powerful way due to emotional paradigms such as love, loneliness, or death/loss.
4. The Gift of Your Voice: A way to personalize the story in order to help the audience understand the context. This is a powerful tool that tells who you are and sets the mood for listening.
5. The Power of the Soundtrack: This includes music or other sounds that support the storyline. The soundtrack is used to set the mood for your story.
6. Economy: Basically this means, using just enough content to tell the story without overloading the viewer with too much information. Therefore, the story-teller needs to choose key points and let the audience fill in the patterns.
7. Pacing: Pacing is related to economy, but specifically deals with how slowly or quickly the story progresses. Pacing is the secret to successful story-telling.

The project plan and storyboard, which I have created for my digital story-telling movie technololgy integrated plan, certainly incorporates these vital seven elements of digital story-telling. In fact, these seven elements are the basic outline for my project plan and storyboard. My project plan and storyboard both have a strong point of view, and include a dramatic question, which is answered by the end of the lesson. I made sure to incorporate emotional content into my project plan/storyboard as well, in order to draw my audience in and keep their attention. Also, I made sure to incoporate the "gift of my voice" and the "power of a soundtrack" into my project plan/storyboard. These are elements of digital story-telling that allowed me to personalize the story while supporting the storyline. In addition, I made sure to keep the "economy" element in mind to ensure that I provided my audience with just enough content to tell the story but not an overload of information. This is another vital element of my project plan/storyboard because it allowed me to focus on the main points and let the audience fill in the patterns. Last but not least, my project plan/storyboard was created with "pacing" in mind. Pacing deals with how slowly or quickly the story progresses and it is the secret to successful story-telling. If you want to learn more about my digital story-telling movie project, then check out the Storyboard. You can also check out my Google Document which provides more specific information regarding my digital story-telling movie technology-integrated plan.