21st Century Skills and Digital Storytelling in the Classroom

PoliCultura is an initiative of collaborative digital storytelling in formal educational contexts run by HOC-LAB, a laboratory at Politecnico di Milano (Italy), one of the largest technical universities in Europe. Launched in 2006, PoliCultura is open to schools of all kinds and levels, in Italy and abroad (international since school year 2013-14). Within PoliCultura, groups of students/classes, supervised by a teacher, create a multimedia interactive story using an online authoring tool by HOC-LAB. So far, more than 1,200 stories have been created by students aged between 4 and 18, from 9 countries. By presenting in detail the initiative and the evaluation data, this chapter makes a case for collaborative digital storytelling as a way to foster the acquisition of 21st century skills: creativity, collaboration, media literacy, life and career skills.