Assignment B Scoop It - Digital Storytelling for Dummies

Assignment B Scoop It - Digital Storytelling for Dummies

Signing up for courses to continue my education always sounds like a great idea. Then when the alarm goes off at the day off, I always question myself and ask "Do I really need this class?". Today the answer to this question was yes and, after the first day of class, this my thoughts have not changed. If anything has changed it's my me questioning, do I need to go back to the basics of understand what digital storytelling really means?

Back to basics: What is Digital Storytelling?

Digital storytelling uses multi medial tools to bring narratives alive. Let's dummy this down so we all understand what we mean here. What do we mean with multi media tools? We use audio, video, voice etc to bring a story to life.

When creating my Scoop It posts, my focus was on breaking digital storytelling down to a level most people can understand. (or perhaps just myself)
                                                                                                            Source: https://bit.ly/2SNgfTU 

How did you approach finding the different elements that you included in your Scoop It post? What keywords, hashtags, or other methods did you use to narrow or expand your search?

As mentioned above, I really felt I needed to go back to basics and truly understand what digital storytelling means and really is. Although we have looked at a ton of material, websites and links today, the basics were not there for me to understand what we were looking at. This was my starting point when creating my ScoopIt page and was which was my first google and youtube search. "What does digital storytelling mean?".

Many videos came up, and although all relevant to my search, the one I picked was short, 2 minutes long as it should be, clear, to the point AND why to create a digital story. Which I found other videos were lacking. A natural flow to the first pick, was how to Create a digital Story. After these two posted I started searching different social media platforms such a twitter, facebook and instagram to further define my search and learnings on what works and what doesn't.

Why did you decide to include the elements you did? What were the criteria you used in order to decide an element was worth including?

I won't lie, there are many video's out there and me weeding out the ones that didn't work for me was based on the level of language and technical term used. Being new to this, and the audience I would create this for, this was very important to me.

In additional to the Google and Youtube search, I did some extensive searches on Twitter and Facebook, using multiple different hashtags such as #digitalstorytelling #storytelling etc. Facebook did not bring up a ton, although I did add myself to a "women in digital media group"

It took me a while and after reviewing many posts, videos and articles it finally started to click with me. We share video's all the time, but we need to create a story with it. @MaritzaCosano posted in Twitter in 2018, sharing that Digital Storytelling is expected to be the #1 marketing tool used by businesses by 2021. Digital storytelling is all around us, from vacation home rentals videos, to car dealers posting videos trying to sell their used cars to promotion videos for weight loss pills.

Do you think your post gives a “full picture” of your issue? Why or why not?

Perhaps not, there is so much information out there, lots has not been covered in my post. That said, I do think it is a great start for all the social media and digital storytelling dummies out there. (just like me) It provides someone with the right tools and step by step guides on the basics to know about digital storytelling. From there I went into some articles on how to use digital storytelling as your social media secret sauce and rolled from there into what types of tools, as in software, are there to use and create content with. That all said, there is much more to it and the articles I picked remain on a service level vs diving deeper into what makes or breaks a digital story with your audience. Which I suggest to do research on before creating something and praying it will catch your audience.

Do you think you could use your Scoop It post as a starting point for writing a longer academic essay? If so, how? If not, why not.

Hmm not sure if I can say yes to that question. I think the information I gathered is more informative and a good starting point for an essay, however some important content is missing from my Scoopt It posts to write an academic essay. I would suggest looking deeper into the how's, why's and really dive deeper into how to be strategic when implementing a digital storytelling strategy into a workplace. Creating something is one thing, having it be impactful and doing what you want it to do, is something else.