digital storytelling: what can it do?

The more I read about digital storytelling, the more I can see using it in my future classroom. I think this is due in part to my tendency to focus on details. When digital storytelling was just a vaguely defined and huge project I was hesitant to try to pictures its use in the classroom. However, now that I have several excellent step by step guides to refer to, leading my students through a digital storytelling project seems much more doable.In his article "Digital Storytelling Finds Its Place in the Classroom," Tom Banaszewski reiterated some of the important points that other authors had made, but also gave me some new information about successfully including this type of project in a writing curriculum. One of his main points of emphasis is that digital storytelling really benefits from student to student collaboration. Having students help each other discover and explore is a one of my biggest teaching goals, so the fact that digital storytelling easily lends itself to this is a huge incentive for me to use it in my classroom. I believe that student collaboration can provide a completely different type of learning than teacher instruction can, and since real world problems are often solved by people working together and not by one person telling everyone else what to do, I think that learning how to operate in this way is incredibly important. If students can learn a skill such as how to use video editing software as well as gain practice in guiding each, all while expressing themselves and their writing talents in a public way, I don't see why I wouldn't use this project to teach.
I addition to convincing me that digital storytelling is a worthwhile use of class time, this article also gave me some more helpful tips for how to orchestrate the project. I understood that planning was important, but having a list of exactly what type of planning needs to be done before students should start compiling visual and audio files is an excellent resource. We've already read some great instructions for actually creating the digital story so I really appreciate Mr. Banaszeki's insights on the planning stage.
I also really enjoyed reading about the prompt that was used in the article. I definitely want to give my students at least some guidelines to guide their project, so I appreciated hearing how one teacher gave their students ideas for content. Although I still don't completely understand the digital storytelling process, the idea of using it in the classroom is growing on me.