Digital storytelling –A fun way to teach and learn creative writing

Digital storytelling –A fun way to teach and learn creative writing
Creative writing has and continues to be a source of great stress for both teachers and students. It is very difficult to get students to express their thoughts and feelings because many of them do not read and as such have very limited ideas to express, while others have ideas and do not know how to express them. Digital storytelling can provide scaffolding for such students, as Jason Ohler in his article “The World of Digital Storytelling,” states “such technologies give voice to a number of otherwise quiet children and to students whose skills don’t fit the usual academic mold.”Digital storytelling can be effectively used in the classroom to assist students in planning their stories through the use of the storyboard. It is a welcome change from the traditional semantic map which is used and overused in most classrooms .In any event many students have difficulty transferring the ideas share during the brainstorming activity and the ideas documented in the semantic map into paragraphs .The use of pictures in digital storytelling can scaffold struggling writers by assisting them in concretizing their thoughts and ideas. By adding titles to each story page the teacher can provide additional support for students to shaping their stories. Digital storytelling caters for the multiple learning styles of students; it can be an exciting interactive fun way of doing creative writing. Digital storytelling can take the boredom, which many students, especially boys, experience with writing, by assisting them in crafting exciting stories using a multisensory medium. The use of audio and video elements adds an exciting element to story writing, one that reluctant writers will find very appealing.