In her 2011 doctoral research study on digital storytelling, Anh Nguyen interviewed graduate
students at the University of Houston about the challenges they faced when they created a
comprehensive digital storytelling project on an educationally relevant topic for a course in which
they were enrolled. Nguyen focused her investigation on understanding the experience of these
digital storytellers and the choices they made in creating their stories. She found that students’
own learning and teaching practices were influenced by personalizing elements in the script, using
computer-based digital storytelling software, reflecting on their own work and listening to feedback
from others, and perhaps most important, sensing their own progress as they worked through all of the components of the digital storytelling process. These findings provide useful implications for
instruction and evaluation in teaching digital storytelling and suggest many opportunities for future
research. Nguyen’s study focused on graduate students’ use of digital storytelling; similar research
that explored digital storytelling use by college and/or high school students would also be valuable
areas for research studies conducted by our current doctoral students. In addition, we are
interested in research that more closely examines characteristics of technological skills and
literacies in order to gain further insight into how individual learners can best take advantage of
digital storytelling in educational settings.
Based on the results of these doctoral research studies, as well as lessons we have learned from
teaching courses, conducting workshops and writing articles on the educational uses of digital
storytelling, we have developed a set of guidelines that we feel educators should consider when
they begin to integrate digital storytelling in their own classrooms and teach students to create
digital stories on instructionally meaningful topics. We have structured these guidelines within the
framework of the ADDIE model of instructional design.