Digital Storytelling using Windows Movie Maker

Explore how digital storytelling increases student participation and memory, and review free resources for using this technology in the classroom.

Last week after posting the article Digital Storytelling Simplified, I received two emails from teachers, one of whom was using a similar simplified method with success; the other teacher asked me why digital storytelling has become so popular in classrooms.

What a great question! How would you respond if someone asked you why you want to use digital storytelling? Email me! I had my own suspicions, but I found several sources that claim digital storytelling can increase your students’ participation by involving them in the creation process; additionally, it can enhance your students’ comprehension and memory by associating events with emotions and images, for example.

Let’s compare reading a paragraph from a history book during a unit on World War I, with the same information shared through digital storytelling: the story reveals the events of Private Victor Silvester’s last week of life, in the trenches. One of your students reads the diary entry while images of soldiers in trenches appear on the projector screen and sounds of bombs exploding echo in the background: “As we were moving up to our sector along the communication trenches, a shell burst ahead of me and one of my platoon dropped. He was the first man I ever saw killed. Both his legs were blown off and the whole of his face and body was peppered with shrapnel. The sight turned my stomach. I was sick and terrified, but even more frightened of showing it” (War Diary extracts).

This is a real experience for students, not a paragraph in a textbook: the emotion of the story relayed through voice inflection, enhanced with images of the trenches and an audio clip of bombs exploding, all combine to pique each learning modality.

In this week’s article, Digital Storytelling, I walk step-by-step through using Windows Movie Maker to create a digital storytelling presentation, and I include several Internet resources for free images and audio clips to enhance any digital story.

If you have a great resource that you use to create digital storytelling projects, please email me.