Improve Writing through Digital Storytelling: Turning Life Into Writing and Speaking

Creating an Environment for Writing Scores to Soar

When students come to school each morning, they have many stories to share with their friends as they unpack or move through the hallways. Stories are shared with the class during morning meetings, or with a teacher.

In the classroom, writing can happen in many different ways, whether it's free writing in a notebook to gather ideas or publishing stories to share with the whole school.

The TEKS: State Standards for Writing expect that children across the grades can write for specific purposes including:

• Opinions that persuade a reader and make an argument
• Informative writings that explain an idea and relay information, and
• Narrative stories of real or imagined events.

As students move from one grade level to another, the complexity of these tasks will change greatly. The persuasive writing that takes place in a second grade classroom will look very different than the work that a seventh grader produces. From kindergarten through 12th grade, students are expected to share their writing through technology, so shouldn't we as adults also do the same?

Finding Voice - Be the Example

Many educators are learning to use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.  Our example can prove to be a great motivator and teaching tool.  Showing our willingness to learn goes a long way in demonstrating the learning process.

There are a handful of terrific mobile apps to help students publish their writing using technology. These digital storytelling apps let students tell their stories using a variety of media, while keeping the craft elements for different writing tasks intact. They'll be able to publish their work for a larger audience and take on roles as they collaborate with their peers to create a final product.


Movenote.com is a one-of-a-kind video presentation tool online and on your portable devices. Movenote is incredibly versatile and is being used in education for blended and flipped learning, in sales and marketing and in everyday messaging. Recording your presentations is easy and quick and everything is sharable online by email or social media with a simple link. Since everything is on a cloud server, you can access your videos practically anywhere and with the statistics tool you will be able to see who watched your video and when. Movenote videos can be watched on any device that supports video, no matter if they have movenote on them or not. You can use movenote directly from your Gmail and your Google Drive and on any desktop computer, laptop, iOS or Android device. Movenote is here to change the way we communicate, join the move(note)ment!

Adobe Voice is a fantastic app for iPads that empowers students to tell stories straight from their tablet. Users can create a narrated slideshow that uses images, icons, and text in addition to the audio recordings. Students can also choose the theme and music they would like to include in their piece. Adobe Voice is a dynamic tool that can be used by children of all ages. With an intuitive, kid-friendly interface, tasks can be scaled up or down depending on the grade level of the students that you're working with. When students open up Adobe Voice, they'll have to login using a class or teacher account, or create their own. You can take children through the app or show them the Getting Started tutorial, which highlights important features.

Storytelling Guidelines

Just like any other time that you use technology with students or with other educators, you won't be handing them the device and sending them off to create. When it comes to publishing with technology, authors should be at the end of the writing process. They've already drafted, revised, and edited their personal narrative, or their group has already come together to plan a presentation of their argument for an opinion piece of writing. 

Use a graphic organizer like a storyboard to plan what you want to appear on each page of the Adobe Voice creation. If you are working in pairs or a small group sharing one device, you'll want to make sure they have a plan for who will record the narration for each page.

Students can share their digital storytelling creations by sharing a link to their finished product. 

Schools that have a Twitter account or website  or blog might want to send out the links so that a wider audience can hear student stories. In classrooms that use student blogs or parent communication tools, it's simple to also share the link to digital creations with viewers outside of your four walls. 

Using technology to publish is so much more than typing up a research report. Turn your students, teachers and principals into digital storytellers with creation tools on mobile devices!

What are your favorite digital storytelling apps?
This article is adapted from thoughts published by Monica Burns.