While any products — slideshows, filmmaking, photo essays, or websites — using any multimedia are technically called digital stories, digital storytelling is a special genre organized around using the author’s own voice as the centerpiece of content while artistically dancing multisensory elements into personal understandings about self, family, knowledge, ideas, events, or experiences .

The special charm and enchantment of a multimedia experience
The rich heritage and art of storytelling around campfires, family tables, or circles of friends is merged with a palette of technical tools to make highly personal experiences and understandings come alive for others. Good storytellers are extremely powerful people. They use their power with words to guide, motivate, teach, inspire, and influence. While we will always enjoy professional storytellers, the availability of audio-editing, image-editing, and video-editing tools is calling all of us to learn the craft of being modern-day digital storytellers who put our own good and inspiring stories into one another’s lives.

As we tell our own personal stories of what we know and understand, digital storytelling gives us a chance to offer our own learning as a profound insight for others who may have had similar experiences. The storyteller’s voice weaves a special charm and enchantment while unfolding a multimedia experience to make a kind of magic that touches others who view the digital storytelling product. These personal stories are designed to deeply touch hearts and connect us to the humanity of one another.

Staying organized ... and telling a story from the heart
Using the Seven Steps to Digital Storytelling, anyone crafting or leading a storytelling experience focuses FIRST on developing a personal narrative STORY about an experience or understanding as if they were sharing it with a small group of friends or family members. This first process step for digital storytelling begins with shaping a tightly written narrative script that is then recorded as a voiceover. The final voiceover is the starting place for myriad decisions that will follow. All images, sounds, transitions, special effects, and music are selected and organized around the author’s narrative voiceover.

Preparing a language-rigorous script can take from 30 percent-50 percent of the total production time as authors grapple with finding their real story – writing and rewriting their tale to incorporate the Take Six: Elements of a Good Story into a powerful story that is told from the heart, not from the head. The Take Six Elements provide essential guidelines guaranteed to morph good stories into memorable great ones! If there is no substantive story to tell, no amount of technological techniques will fix a poorly written, or flat, impersonal story.

Digital storytelling gives everyone a unique, enchanting experience of discovering their own voice, artistic talent, and originality. Even more important, students discover they have something worth sharing with others along with learning the joyful art of creating effective, memorable pieces of communication.