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Supporting Student Learning Toward Twenty-First-Century Skills Through Digital Storytelling

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Shaping Future Schools with Digital Technology

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of Digital storytelling (DST) as a pedagogical method that supports teachers’ practices and students’ learning to meet the needs and requirements of twenty-first-century skills by making student-centered knowledge creation possible at schools. Digital stories are student-generated videos that can consist of single or multiple events in curriculum-related topics or other themes for students’ learning. The chapter starts with description of megatrends in learning and teaching environments and changes in working life. DST is reflected on as a method that prepares students to new knowledge ecosystem and open learning spaces. The conceptual model of Global Sharing Pedagogy is used as a structure of these reflections. The chapter also illustrates DST in three case studies: digital stories across countries, a video inquiry project in STEM learning and teaching, and learning math with DST. Based on these case studies, in the final section we discuss evaluation strategies that should be considered when moving toward student-driven knowledge creation. We conclude by making recommendations for using DST in learning and teaching. The main conclusion is that DST is an efficient pedagogical method that can be used at schools to support students’ development of twenty-first-century skills. Additionally, this method also provides plenty of opportunities for student-centered active learning which leads to increased students’ agency, engagement, learning motivation, and joyful learning.

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Correspondence to Hannele Niemi .

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Niemi, H., Niu, S.J., Li, B., Vivitsou, M. (2019). Supporting Student Learning Toward Twenty-First-Century Skills Through Digital Storytelling. In: Yu, S., Niemi, H., Mason, J. (eds) Shaping Future Schools with Digital Technology. Perspectives on Rethinking and Reforming Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9439-3_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9439-3_6

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