There are many things you need to consider before creating a digital story for a classroom project. Below, you'll find a guide to thinking through what it takes to be successful in telling your story digitally.

A Thoughtful Approach

Before you take on a digital storytelling project (or any project where you're creating content for an audience), you want to make sure you have a good handle of the relationship between yourself as the author, the audience, the topic at hand, and the purpose for what you're doing. Some questions to get you started:

  • What experiences, backgrounds, biases, beliefs am I bringing to this project?
  • What is expected of me in my response to this project? What has to be discussed?
  • What is the best way to address this topic with my skills, purpose, and audience?
  • What format might be best for this unique communicative situation?
  • What is my purpose? Am I trying to entertain, inform, shock, persuade, educate, motivate?
  • Who am I trying to reach? What will it take to do so? What age, social class, education, past experience, cultural/subcultural experiences should I take into account as I compose this project? 
  • What is the greater historical context or current context that surrounds this topic, the audience I'm trying to reach, or why I'm doing this? 

Priorities and Managing Expectations

You'll want to think hard about what the project is asking you to do before embarking on this journey. Is it more about how you interact and communicate the content? Or is it more about creating a highly sophisticated show piece that can be shared with a real-world audience? You'll need to manage your expectations of yourself. There is a time for perfectionism with quality and a time for making sure you're conveying the right message and interacting with course content in the appropriate way.  This will largely be up to your professor and is hopefully clear from the project guidelines, so make sure you're clear on expectations and letting those be your guide.

Choosing a Mode of Digital Storytelling

Now you get to choose what mode of digital storytelling will best suit the unique relationship between your skills and interests, the audience you're trying to communicate with, and what kind of information you need to convey. While not exhaustive, here are some ideas of modes you can choose: 

  • A video digital story can incorporate images, video clips, music, sound effects. It can also incorporate other things like slide decks, data, hand-drawn or illustrated content, maps, news clips, historical audio/video, interviews/oral history, art or music produced or inspired by the subject. 
  • Podcasts come in all shapes, sizes, genres, styles, etc. Some are short, some are long. Some are heavily scripted, some are informal and conversational. Some are heavily research based, some are entertaining. You have to figure out what style works for you, for your intended audience, and is appropriate to the content at hand. Things to consider incorporating: news clips, historical audio, interviews, multiple speakers, music produces or inspired by the subject(s), a unique introduction. For a more comprehensive guide to podcasting, view this slide deck.
  • Websites or exhibits might be a great choice if you are working with content fit for a global or broader audience, if you're hoping to integrate many multimedia components with text, if you want to include any sort of interactivity with your audience, if you need a larger format organizational structure, if you want to collaborate with others, or create something as a lasting reference or resource. See this webpage for more on creating a website or web exhibit. 
  • Infographics can be a great choice if you want to make something visually appealing, simplify complex concepts or data, exercise communicating concisely, or make something highly sharable, versatile, and accessible. A great tool for creating infographics is Piktochart or Canva. One perk of Piktochart is that you can also make presentations out of your infographics, so you can create one artifact and get multiple products out of it - infographic > presentation > video content.
  • Non-linear interactive web stories created with Twine are versatile and can be used to present a wide range of content in an engaging and interactive manner. You can use this to showcase interactive stories of the choose-your-own adventure sort, educational tutorials, historical reenactments, gamified simulation and decision-making content, character development, personal narratives, visual art galleries, interactive poetry, environmental awareness — the list is pretty endless. While you don't need to be an advanced coder to create these stories, the more sophisticated of a look you're going for, the more work involved. There is a much higher learning curve to creating this kind of content and that should be taken into account when you're weighing this against other options.
  • Social media can be a great tool for engaging with a wider audience when telling your story. Just ask the Civil War Reporter or Titanic In Real Time on Twitter (X).  You can use a combination of multimedia (text, images, videos, and audio), you can utilize time stamps and dates (for a "this day in history" type of narrative), and you can actively engage with your audience by asking questions, running polls, etc. It can be an innovative way to bring historical content into a contemporary space or break large stories up into a series of smaller related elements that combine into a cohesive narrative. This structure might ask you to embody a persona that is fictionalized and explore and consider the ethics of doing so as well. 

Exposure

Just like we read and discuss quality literature in preparation for writing assignments, you should be doing the same when it comes to creating digital stories, recording and archiving oral history, or creating a podcast. See what's been done before. Get a lay of the land.  Creating a micro-documentary? A podcast? Think critically about what works for you as an audience and what doesn't as you watch/listen to the multitude of examples you can find. Need some examples? View examples here.  

Preparing for Success

Thinking Through the Logistics: When you're working with various multimedia elements, you'll want to think through the many logistics that are at play so that you can start your project early enough. Some questions to consider:

  • What kind of equipment or software might I need and how will I get it? 
  • Will I need a quiet place to record audio? Where will I go?
  • If group work is at play, how will we define roles and share responsibilities (and files)?
  • If interviewing other people, provide plenty of time to coordinate schedules AND test equipment/strategy for recording
  • How much writing/scripting/storyboarding needs done?

Embrace the Process

You're working with multiple modes of media — it's going to take a lot of time and energy to do it well. Here are the "steps" of the digital storytelling process and what those really mean: 

  1. Come up with an idea and maybe even write a proposal, abstract or goal statement.
  2. Research, explore and learn as much as you can. This is where you'll see what's out there (and what isn't!), gather artifacts and knowledge. This is where you'll revisit and refine your idea based on what you find.
  3. Write/script/outline. If you're incorporating audio narration, this is where you learn to write for sound (which is vastly different than writing for the eye). You'll have to plan for pacing, figure out what has to be said and what can be communicated with the other modes of communication you're using (sound, music, visuals). Text written for the ear needs to be simpler since it moves at the speed of sound. Write for the way you speak naturally and lean into silence/pausing. Limit discipline-specific jargon or acronyms if you're aiming for a more informal/conversational tone.
  4. Gather and create. This is the fun part. This is where you gather and create your visuals, audio, text, etc. You might underestimate the work involved here. You could find elements from an archive that you have to travel to access. You might find artifacts that you have to ask for permission to use (copyright-protected materials). You might find that you have to create what you're envisioning because it doesn't exist yet, which involves learning how to use a camera or audio recorder. You might find something that totally changes the course of your story and send you back to step 1. Plan for these things and start early.
  5. Put it all together. This is where you learn how to use the technology necessary to create your story, how you stitch the tapestry of your story together, and how to make critical decisions in what to include and how to organize it. Take into account the learning curve for each technology when you're creating a plan and a timeline for your project.

It Takes a Village

Here are some institutional supports for bringing your digital storytelling hopes into reality: