"We need to tell someone else a story that describes our experience because the process of creating the memory structure that contains the gist of the story will be remembered for the rest of our lives."
— Robert Shank, Tell Me a Story

Digital storytelling is not just for language arts! The stories being told by the storyteller do not all need to be personal memories or fictional tales. The Take Six: Elements of a Good Story can easily be incorporated into non-fictional content storytelling to share what students know and understand about topics with a special twist. In order to create thoughtful first-person narrative stories, students are forced to make deeper meaning of the content, events, or topics. The process of personalizing the content challenges authors to truly clarify their own thinking and understanding before beginning the process of communicating their story to others. The key is to go beyond the literal factoids by adding personal meaning. All good storytelling imbeds a moral of the story or lesson learned.

Sharing our personalized understanding of what we know about an event or topic provides a “sense-making” process that enables us to deal with myriad data details in a profound way that sticks with us over time. Artificial intelligence research is showing that the more people are buried in the mind-numbing avalanche of today’s information, the greater the importance of stories in making sense of the endless pieces of data. Designing information requires learning a new type of grammar — beyond writing words — that helps students deepen their understanding of content while increasing their visual, sound, oral language, and information literacy skills.

An essential process for conveying information
While storytelling does not replace analytical thinking, good storytelling does provide an essential process for conveying information in an easily absorbed form. People today are quite simply up to their eyeballs in information. There is increasing urgency to develop communication skills that translate raw information into valuable knowledge for ourselves as well as others — a sense-making of the world around us. When using resources like video clips and still images found at United Streaming or the visual and audio resources found at the Library of Congress, teachers can guide students in making biographical, historical, current event, or science facts come ALIVE for themselves and others through the process of digital storytelling .

Sample ideas for going beyond factoids
The following sample ideas for digital storytelling are based on shifting from retelling the literal facts about a person or event into using first-person narratives and the author’s voice as a storyteller to create a personalized experience as if they were actually there in order to make their topic come alive for others. All of these nonfiction digital stories still incorporate Take Six: Elements of a Good Story using personal voice narratives that culminate in a moral or lesson learned that shares with others an explicit connection with the importance of the topic to themselves, community, or humanity. The storytelling goes beyond the factoids to develop a personal understanding of how this topic, event, or person matters.

Digital storytelling about events and topics need to reflect the author’s full intellectual, emotional and personal engagement with the subject — not just a reporting of facts and information. As we practice the craftsmanship of designing information through mixing colors, images, symbols, voice tones, music, sound, and artful pacing, we are also striving to crystallize our perspectives into memorable digital tales that reveal meaning and understanding out of the data and complexity in our lives. We want students to be able to artfully use the digital media in ways that dance ideas together into illuminated understandings — digital storytelling is a powerful process that taps into these skills.