There are several similarities and differences between instructional practices used with emergent and beginning literacy learners through the digital stories. The main similarity is that both the students use a lot of energy to activate memory so that they can be decent writers. Both procedures gave a chance for every beginner to apply speaking, listening, reading and writing. Both needed a steady release of notions to make education more controllable. The instructional practices applied the use of traditional methods of education while the digital stories applied the use of digital methods such as scribble and touch screens (Barrett, 2006). The instructional practices mainly focus on reading and writing for early literacy while digital stories go beyond. Digital stories boost the creativity of early learners and boost their general knowledge about things discussed in the stories.
The digital stories are more affected by a child’s background than the instructional practices. It takes a long for a child from traditional background to learn how to use the device used in digital stories than a child from a modern background. This causes lack of concentration and more time for understanding unlike a child from a digital family will automatically have interest. Due to technological advancements in the 21st century, digital stories are overtaking instructional practices in early childhood education (Robin, 2008).
Listening, speaking, reading and writing are altogether important constituents of literacy that have to be advanced at the same moment. Majoring on one and forgetting the others has a huge impact on the future education of the learners. Listening and speaking are extra deeply applied by emergent and starting pupils as it creates the path for additional literacy studying. Oral language advancement is the most significant gauge of future literacy enhancement (Rog, 2006). Therefore learners should be subjected to verbal communication more than reading and writing. Oral communication mostly involves listening and speaking. They should invest more in children in early education by providing them with early childhood programs with firm literacy constituents that affect perfect adaptations for kids with special needs. This means that most institutes for emergent and beginning literacy assume the adjustments for children with special needs making their early education more difficult. Lastly, the preschools that offer these services need an excellent parent-school relation for their success. In some preschool in my neighbourhood, I noticed that parents have to sign after every assignment the child does. This relation helps a lot in the success of children at this stage.
Creating literacy environment for emergent and beginning learners is very important, and it has been expanding with time. Good environments boost literacy in some way. Literacy environment has expanded to empower kids to become better learners. Children require materials to back their literacy advancement. Children are motivated to learn when they can reach writing equipment with which they can express themselves through symbols. Therefore writing tools, books and papers should be all over the classroom so that they can notice and use them for various purposes. They also take part in more reading and writing actions in print-rich surroundings (Slegers, 1996). For babies, teachers can offer simple art tools such as crayons, markers, and papers for them to reconnoitre and adventure. For pre-schoolers, tutors can get children’s concentration to certain letters and words in the surrounding whenever it is necessary. Creation of literacy environment for emerging and beginning learners has been refined to provide more time for children to explore literacy. Children should have some time to take part in literacy-related plays by distributing and transferring information to friends in a writing station. Children are nowadays involved in activities such as making menus for hotels, writing grocery lists and inviting people to classroom occasions (Teale and Yokota, 2000). These activities help them have the abilities appropriate to reading and writing. However, children vigorously build their literacy skills and plans, and to read and write naturally and playfully. Therefore the expansions are just meant to boost them at a certain level.
The digital story can help others to cause social adjustment for literacy teaching and learning. People share stories via the fresh digital media tools. A digital story is seen as a merger between traditional storytelling and the application of multimedia technology (Smeda, Dakich and Sharda, 2014). This has changed how teachers and learners socially interact. The digital stories are structured in such a way that they emphasize on personal element making them give the story a personal touch that can change the social life of teachers and learners. The advancing technologies and media possessions help teachers in looking into matters of cultural fitness and variety which leads to social change. Digital storytelling can give shared experiences and link people to the cultural and social movement. This kind of linkage motivates the society and linking a variety of individuals via shared experiences (Marshall, Taylor and Yu, 2004). Digital storytelling projects notions bring students and society together to share about present matters and agree on thoughts of digital stories to help them adjust socially. Learners are motivated to get to know better about the matters and people of their surrounding society. The openness of educators during digital storytelling assists to improve their relationship with learners creating a social adjustment.
The topic I might consider developing into a research question is digital storytelling. My research project will look into the effects of the digital story on learners’ engagement and results. My research will focus on adventuring the potential of digital story telling as a creative educating and learning strategy and its impacts in promoting learner engagement and results. This research will have an impact on P-12 schools, and it will be the best idea to consider involving several site case studies of P-12 schools. Educators and learners in the chosen schools should have the chance of involving themselves in creative learning experiences grounded o digital storytelling. Both qualitative and quantitative means of information collection and analysis should be used to improve the reliability and validity of the study (Armstrong, 2003). My research can be divided into different sub-questions to look into the matter fully. This research is important since it will help both educators and learners to tap into the power of digital storytelling. Therefore, those students and teachers who do not apply the use of storytelling may opt to engage in it after this research. Finally, it will give the best way of incorporating digital story telling into schools.
- Armstrong, S., 2003. The power of storytelling in education. Snapshots, pp.11-20.
- Barrett, H., 2006. Researching and evaluating digital storytelling as a deep learning tool. Technology and teacher education annual, 1, p.647.
- Marshall, S., Taylor, W. and Yu, X.H. eds., 2004. Using community informatics to transform regions. IGI Global.
- Robin, B.R., 2008. Digital storytelling: A powerful technology tool for the 21st century classroom. Theory into practice, 47(3), pp.220-228.
- Rog, L.J., 2006. Marvelous minilessons for teaching beginning writing, K-3. International Reading Assoc.
- Slegers, B., 1996. A Review of the Research and Literature on Emergent Literacy.
- Smeda, N., Dakich, E. and Sharda, N., 2014. The effectiveness of digital storytelling in the classrooms: a comprehensive study. Smart Learning Environments, 1(1), p.6.
- Teale, W. and Yokota, J., 2000. Beginning reading and writing: Perspectives on instruction. Beginning reading and writing: Language and literacy series, pp.3-21.