Digital Storytelling as a Whole-Class Learning Activity: Lessons from a Three-Years Project

This paper introduces PoliCultura, a project created by Politecnico di Milano for the Italian schools, which has just completed three years of deploy-ment. Participating classes (with pupils aged between 4 and 18 years) are required to create their own multimedia story, using an authoring-delivery envi-ronment (1001stories) provided by Politecnico di Milano. PoliCultura has of-fered us the opportunity to investigate the prolongeduse of digital storytelling authoring tools as a whole-class educational activity in a wide numberof real educational settings: approximately 7,620 pupils from 381 classes have been involved in this project since its birth in 2006. From the overall PoliCultura ex-perience and from the wide amount of qualitative and quantitative data col-lected from participants though online surveys, focus groups, interviews and contextual inquiry activities, we have learned a number of lessons that we discuss in the paper.