Saturday, November 29, 2008

What are ebooks and digital storytelling?

As an educator I have never heard of the terms ebooks and digital storytelling until I took this course. During my research and reading from the Library 2.0 and Beyond, I now have a pretty good idea what they are.

Ebooks are online resources. They take up hardly any physical space, the weight is very lite, and it provides very little disk space. For example, The Civil War holds the same amount of space as MP3 format. The majority of ebooks formats are searchable and they can substitute for dictionaries. Also, they can make tables of contents and indexes to be used as hyperlinks freely accessible and commercial. Project Gutenberg is one of the largest and oldest online sources of ebooks. It provides 19,000 public domain works that has been proofread by volunteers. Manybooks.net reformat a huge collection of Gutenberg texts into a e-reader format. Ebooks has a variety of commercial content. Some of them includes Mobipocket, eReader, the Palm eBook Store, and cookbooks. Reference books are available in ebooks for law, medicine, and humanities. Ebooks focus on areas where print materials are lacking.

Digital storytelling is a story told using moving digital images, digital voiceover narrative, and digital music. They are short and sweet usually 3 to 5 minutes long. Digital storytelling is created for people to tell stories about the lives using drama and emotional content. It must include facts established form context and meaning. Library 2.0 and Beyond lists the seven elements of digital storytelling:
  • Point (of view)
  • Dramatic question
  • Emotional content
  • The gift of your voice
  • The power of the soundtrack
  • Economy
  • Pacing
Digital stories can/cannot have music; however, the absence of music speaks volumes. With music it produces mood, builds emotion, and tells the story. The story must be economical with approximately 150 words. Digital storytelling helps promotes the technology use of the libraries, educate students, teachers, and the community.

At my school digital storytelling is being used the technology language arts, and government classes. I am not sure about ebooks, but the use of it will be beneficial for the students.

6 comments:

Vernisa Durden said...

Thanks for that background information Lahama. You summed both tools up in good details.
Your school sounds very technology-forward. We don't use either: digital storytelling or ebooks. I'm very excited about using digital storytelling with my students, however. Many of my students perform below grade level (mostly because they don't apply themselves) but they are very quick to catching on to technology related "stuff." This would be a great experience for them and I know they would hit the mark!

Jeanne Jones said...

You're right about music playing such an integral part of setting the mood in the movie. I never really gave much thought as to the role of music plays in films until I made my own. Thanks for giving such thorough detalis on digital storytelling.

Anne Graner said...

Thanks for sharing the information on Digital Storytelling from our Library 2.0 book. I liked the point that was made in the book about how libraries need to become more concerned with the right-brained aptitudes. So, instead of just managing information and leading people to it, with digital storytelling we are helping people to find meaning in information in ways that leads them to a deeper experience with the information. We have so much of the regurgitation of facts in schools that this avenue of meaning-making helps us faciltation for the whole person.

Holly said...

Like you, I was unsure of what ebooks and digital storytelling actually were until taking this class. Now I see many of the benefits like the ones you have listed. I liked your point that music in digital stories has a profound effect on the story itself. While viewing classmates' stories, I found that music was my favorite part. A writer aims to move thier reader emotionally or intellectually in some direction. By adding multimedia to stories, authors, at times, may be more effective in hooking and moving their readers. Images, audio sound effects, and music can all add powerful supplemental details. I do not think that traditional writing and books will go away, and they should not. However the possibilities in the digital world of storytelling are only limited by creativity.

Jodi said...

What a great review of ebooks and digital storytelling. I also had not had much experience with either of these until recently. Music does play a major role in the digital storytelling. Simply changing the music will create very different stories.

Alecia said...

I had never heard of digital storytelling until this class either. I was very surprised at the user friendliness of the program. I agree with you that all of the elements involved in the digital story telling help people to tell their story in an emotional way. I'm also pleased to know that school students are also using this software program for classroom asignments.