DIGITAL STORYTELLING IN THE MIDDLE SCHOOL: STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION AND ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

Digital storytelling (J. Lambert) is an interdisciplinary tool that helps teachers to personalize educational process and students to acquire learning material better, improve st century skills and develop agency. It implies narratives and animated presentations of ideas, created by students with the use of computer-based tools. The work on a digital story improves students’ computational thinking skills and multimodal literacy, associated with visual perception, understanding and responding to digital and multimedia texts. In order to study learning potential and students’ perception of such educational technology the research was conducted by The Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Contemporary Childhood in March, . It was completed on the basis of School № in Kashira within the government assignment «Development of technology for overcoming adolescent risks: school theater based on role-playing experimentation».  adolescents took part in  lessons in Fine Arts. After reading “Letters about the good and beautiful” by Dmitriy Likhachev, they fi gured out the appropriate statements to develop them into digital stories of moral choice. Having sketched the plots of their stories in pencil, the schoolers worked on animated fi lms in stop-motion technique. That work included drawing scenery and characters, taking and editing photos, processing photos into short animated fi lms, adding sound and subtitles. Adolescents completed  digital stories. Due to their  refl ective journals, fi lled in the form of open-ended questions, they mostly experienced interest, pleasure and fun at the lessons. Adolescents wrote that they learned to work in teams, be attentive to others and overcome interaction challenges. They found diffi cult to come up with visual metaphors and story plots, but all their new skills might be practical for other school projects. To conclude, digital storytelling may be incorporated into the curriculum to update and enhance studying as well as bridge Literature, IT and Fine Arts together.