Tell your tales; make them true. If they endure, so will you.
—James Keller.

Gather round those roaring campfires, picnic tables, or even a fondue pot, because the ancient art of storytelling is being revived into an emerging communication mode called digital storytelling. Stories are as old as people and are more important than ever for our spirits, minds, and human progress. Becoming good storytellers gives us personal power as we guide, motivate, entertain, educate, inspire, and influence others through the artful use of story.

Designing and communicating information requires students to deepen their understanding of content while increasing visual, sound, oral language, creativity, and thinking skills. Making meaning out of an experience deepens the communication for both the author and the viewers. The author’s narrative voice is the center of all the multimedia decisions. The story’s narrative is first made into a voiceover and then all images, sound, music, transitions, and special effects are organized around unfolding this story.

Telling stories together about things that really matter has an extraordinary effect on people. Digital media and digital distribution to the world community is reshaping the power of oral storytelling, enabling us to unfold a highly sensory experience that dances a narrative voice with images, sound, and music into illuminated understandings. What an experience to incorporate digital storytelling into your classroom and guide a new generation into becoming 21st- Century StoryKeepers™, knowing their personal narratives will endure for others long after the fires die down!

Take Six: Elements of Good Storytelling
To help increase the quality of student stories, I developed Take Six: Elements of Digital Storytelling. For example, Showing not Telling is a quality long expected in good writing pieces, and this same element also creates exceptionally good stories as well. However, I want to focus on two specific elements in this article because they are considered especially essential for good storytelling: Living in the Story and Unfolding Lessons Learned. If either of these two elements is missing, you likely are viewing a great digital story... but not storytelling.

Living in the Story
So many digital stories are telling about their topics; even personal ones such as a story about grandma, a pet, or getting a first bicycle. Even if told very well, we often can’t feel the author in these about tales. Digital storytelling encourages authors to write a very personal emotional connection with the tale being told. The power of storytelling is not in telling about an event or someone else’s life, but rather in shifting the lens to using the setting, details, and events for telling your story with the experience.

You may not be a character in the story, but your audience should still be able to feel what you feel or how the situation affects you. In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink defines story grammar as the “ability to encapsulate, contextualize, and emotionalize information, understanding, and experiences for yourself and others.” Emotionalizing information gives important “sticking power” in our brains and for our audience. The written narrative for storytelling should be coached as a first-person perspective, unfolding the storytelling from the author’s heart, not his or her head.

Unfolding a Lesson Learned
Have you ever been with someone who is telling a story and seems to be going on and on and on? You begin to get restless, wondering... is there a point here you are trying to make? Good storytelling needs a “spine” to hold the audience’s attention and deliver a timely, memorable ending. Good storytelling strives to find the essence of meaning or value this person, experience, or situation made in their lives. The lesson learned is a kind of moral of the story, such as the ones we find in fairy tales—revealing the wisdom or understandings gained from the experience or knowledge. Wrapping up each digital storytelling with a lesson learned also gives it depth and meaning beyond the “what happened” story points.

Finding the Lessons Learned
Frequently an author knows the story he or she wants to tell but has not made meaning out of it yet. What does my sister’s autism mean to my life? How do I find meaning in my life as a foster child? What do I now know, believe, or understand about the world from this experience? It requires the author to dig deep, reflect, and make personal meaning beyond the facts. Finding the lesson learned significantly changes authors as well as the experience they create for their audience.

Good storytelling is a journey for every author who is digging deep into the meaning of their stories for themselves and others. As part of a digital storytelling week, I worked with Ms. Liza Medina’s middle school class at Ramapos Central Schools, New York. Students were given the task of finding their own visual parallel personal stories to unfold while narrating Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”.

When students began, they struggled to create more than a literal connection to the poem. When we tried to get them to uncover their own emotions and feelings behind their experience with Frost’s poem, students clammed up. After numerous efforts, Ms. Medina decided to share her own story two different ways (see below).

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