Collective Digital Storytelling at School as a Whole-Class Interaction

There is a growing interest in the use of collaborative technologies for education. However, their adoption and implementation in formal education is still lagging behind. One feature of cooperative technologies makes them particularly unusable in classroom settings: most tools, environments and interfaces for co-located collaboration are designed to support the interaction of small groups rather than entire classes. This paper proposes ‘‘collective digital storytelling’’ as a way to engage whole classes into activities that provide substantial educational benefits. The paper draws on empirical data from a large-scale digital storytelling project in Italy, in its fourth year of implementation, and examines several aspects and benefits related to the use of digital storytelling in formal education, focusing upon two specific issues: (1) how digital storytelling can engage the whole class, rather than individuals or small groups and (2) how digital storytelling can be integrated in the curricular activities, generating substantial learning benefits.