Digital storytelling is a multimodal approach to traditional storytelling that emerged during the digital age. It began as a narrative tool to express personal discourse and stories. As it evolves, it is also gaining momentum with conveying non-fictional concepts to instruct learners in various domains. A digital story typically contains a video, story script, graphics, photos, music and/ or text. These components appeal to visual, auditory, musical and linguistic learners. In addition, digital storytelling can incorporate movement such as interpretive dance to convey ideas and creative art, which are great pedagogical techniques to engage kinesthetic and tactile learners. Digital storytelling is in alignment with the majority of ISTE standards for learners and educators and provides a technological instructional approach that is multifaceted and multidisciplinary.
Digital storytelling is designed to be presented in a video format. YouTube is a dynamic video sharing application that will allow you to organize, share and facilitate collaboration of digital storytelling videos for students in K-12, higher education and adult learning settings. YouTube’s various features help educators that are interested in enhancing the creation, application and collaboration of digital stories to have an intuitive interface to conveniently implement digital storytelling. YouTube is a free service that can easily be accessed by signing in with a Google account, which will lead you to your home page to begin uploading digital storytelling content. You also have the option of creating a YouTube page by creating your own account outside of Google.
When you access your YouTube page, you will have the option of adding graphics to your homepage that can appeal to a digital storytelling theme. As an educator, you can also use YouTube as a convenient storehouse to organize digital stories that you or you students create on one channel or on various channels. Educators that have multiple courses or trainings can create different channels to organize digital stories for each course. In addition, the channels also provide a playlist feature that allows further categorization of digital stories based on class themes. In addition, YouTube has an option to list or unlist your digital stories. Unlisted videos make the videos available for your personal use or for learners’ who you provide access to.
If you work in a school setting with multiple classes or have international access to other students that would like to share digital stories, the YouTube “live” option allows you to invite other classrooms to view YouTube digital stories in real time. This option is a great way to encourage discourse on the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy with students in different settings via live chat postings. In addition, learners can benefit from having the option to make comments to other learners and the instructor to gain clarification on learning goals. YouTube also features an option to embed music, text, graphics or photos into the video to highlight digital storytelling components. YouTube is an optimal educational technology video sharing tool that allows educators to conveniently facilitate digital storytelling that will engage digital age learners.