I had hit upon something really useful to blog about regarding research, but in between dinner and an episode of Law and Order it's vanished from my radar. Today, I was on fire, writing and tracking down websites related to my thesis research. I think that my epiphany was that you really need to Google a variety of variations of your main topic. In my case, I've Googled 'digital storytelling' dozens of times, along with 'multimedia storytelling,' 'interactive storytelling,' 'digital narrative,' 'narrative technology,' 'storytelling technology,' 'storytelling in education,' 'storytelling tools,' 'storytelling technology,' but I think that tonight I hit the jackpot - 'digital media in education.' It made so much sense once I followed a few resources. A perfect category for what digital storytelling would fall under, with regard to the proper educational context. And then of course, 'digital storytelling in education' yielded resources I have not reviewed yet.
Earlier in the day(while watching my New England Patriots stomp the Colts), I had been compiling a list of software tools that support the core phases of a digital storytelling project. A major tenet of my thesis is that nearly all of the software tools for digital storytelling do next to nothing to support the hardest part - writing the story, structuring the basic story, figuring out what you want to say(not sure how to categorize this part). I plan to create a table of all the commercial software that targets students/novice multimedia producers. These are the basic stages of a creating a digital story, not necessarily followed strictly in this order:
- Writing the story script
- Locating, Creating, and Importing Media Elements - could call this Asset Acquisition?
- Storyboarding
- Recording the Voice Over
- Text/Titling
- Adding Effects, Transitions
- Export story for sharing with audience
The major categories of software that support the above digital storytelling stages:
- Multimedia Authoring
- Screen Writing
- Slideshow Creator
- Audio Capture
- Presentation
- Animation
- Multimedia Scrapbook *this may not be that relevant but it does provide digital story opps
Digital media production has always had professional level tools, such as Avid or Adobe Premiere, for editing large video projects, but schools are now benefitting from the scaled down non-linear video editing programs aimed at the novice video editor. The 'Multimedia Authoring' category could be broken down into 'Non-linear Video Editing' as a specific category that makes a distinction between programs that have a timeline to construct your story along and programs line PowerPoint or HyperStudio that provide for an interactive digital story.
The major players in the digital storytelling in schools/educational multimedia producation market:
- iMovie
- Final Cut Express
- Video Studio
- MovieMaker
- MovieWorks
- VideoBlender, MediaBlender, ImageBlender
- HyperStudio
- Photo Story
- Brain Glow
- Quick Time Pro
- eZedia
