Digital Storytelling is the practice of using computer-based tools to tell stories. As with traditional storytelling, most digital stories focus on a specific topic and contain a particular point of view. However, as the name implies, digital stories usually contain some mixture of computer-based images, text, recorded audio narration, video clips and/or music. Digital stories can vary in length, but most of the stories used in education typically last between two and ten minutes. And the topics that are used in Digital Storytelling range from personal tales to the recounting of historical events, from exploring life in one's own community to the search for life in other corners of the universe, and literally, everything in between.

It is defined as the practice of combining personal narrative with multimedia (images, audio and text) to produce a short autobiographical movie. The term “digital storytelling” can suggest a variety of meanings to many different people. Two thousand years ago, people used rocks and sticks to tell stories on cave walls. Today, we have a much broader range of media to create our stories.

Digital Storytelling makes use of low-cost digital cameras, non-linear editing software and notebook computers to create short, multimedia stories. These are essentially personal stories and are made for publication on the internet (which explains, with current technology, why they must be short), although, if output to tape, they are capable of achieving broadcast quality.

Digital Stories are not quite like any previous form of broadcast material, they might look a bit like films even though they are not ‘movies’ since, for the most part, they are made with still pictures. They might be like radio-with-pictures but – with production values that come from the scrapbook rather than the studio – they certainly do not look like television.



Digital Stories can be made almost anywhere (in offices, houses, classrooms, youth centres etc) from stories based on peoples family photo archives.

Digital Storytelling is not easy to do but it can be learned. A typical seminar can run for three days. The first day is about script construction and image capture. The following days comes’ an intensive production workshop that includes voice and video editing. The team of trainers includes a project manager, a script expert, a video editor, IT support and a creative director. This team delivers the skills to a group of 10 to 15 participants. It is important to underline that digital story telling can be produced in a three day seminar by people who have never used a computer, people with learning difficulties, people with mental health problems, with asylum seekers, school drop-outs, ROMA, Institutionalized people etc, as well as students of primary and secondary education with a special focus on their curriculum. Anyone can make a Digital Story because everyone has a story to tell.

There are many non-linear sound and video-editing packages. Those we are using are Movie Maker for video editing and Audacity for sound editing as well as Adobe Photoshop for image manipulation.

British photographer, educator and digital storyteller, Daniel Meadows defines digital stories as "short, personal multimedia tales told from the heart." The beauty of this form of digital expression, he maintains is that these stories can be created by people everywhere, on any subject, and shared electronically all over the world.