How to design a digital storytelling authoring tool for developing pre-reading and pre-writing skills

In the paper we describe an exploration into the design of an authoring tool to support the creation of multimedia stories. We explicitly targeted children with no reading or writing skills and their educators. Children in this age group often enjoy reading and creating stories together with adults and in so doing develop important pre-literacy skills. Literature suggests that when children play an active role in these activities, with a high level of engagement and interaction, there is a significant increase in their vocabulary acquisition and an improvement in their communication skills. Thus, we investigated these issues by conducting an explorative study in a pre-school class with fifteen children and three teachers. Here, we describe the emerging challenges and provide design directions for an authoring system to support the co-creation of stories for pre-literate children

APPLYING DIGITAL STORYTELLING TO IMPROVE INDONESIAN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ VISUAL MEMORY AND WRITING SKILL

This study investigated the use of digital storytelling in improving students’ visual memory and writing skill of tenth grade students in one of senior high school in Tangerang, Indonesia. A total of 72 students are taken as the sample in the current study. The randomized pretest - posttest control group design was used in the study. Using quasi experimental research-non-equivalent control group design, the students in the experimental groups completed the process through digital storytelling. The students’ test and questionnaires were used to collect the data. In order to test whether there was an improvement within groups and to see if there were differences between groups, the hypotheses were tested using the t-test and obtaining gain scores. The result showed that the visual memory and writing skill of students undergoing digital storytelling technique and of those undergoing conventional teaching but no significant differences were found between the two conditions. They had same proficiency, focused and same concentration during the learning process, and the students had many opinions in experimental class. Based on the percentages, students’ post-test showed that students’ visual memory was more dominant than students’ writing skill after applying digital storytelling. Moreover, this research also found that students’ learning motivation was very good and created a good of class atmosphere in experimental class during the learning process by using digital storytelling

“The girl who wants to fly”:Exploring the role of digital technology in enhancing dialogic reading

Research suggests that dialogic reading and wordless picture books may improve narrative production and comprehension leading to better school readiness. We aim to understand children's experiences using a wordless picture book scaffolded by audio prompts. We designed, implemented and assessed the Spring-a-story web app with 35 children aged 3 to 6 in a socio-economically-disadvantaged area in the UK. We sought to comprehend to what extent the application supports children in creating a narrative, and which type of prompts (basic dialogic reading and theory of mind prompts) better support their meaningful responses. Initial findings suggest how children were able to respond meaningfully to prompts and reported high levels of enjoyment of the activity. Furthermore, theory of mind prompts resulted in a marginally higher percentage of meaningful responses and theory of mind language compared to basic dialogic reading prompts. Study outcomes helped to delineate the design space that we shaped into six design challenges that aim to inform the community and guide the future design of tools to support children in independent dialogic reading of wordless picture e-books

A mobile application for improving student reading fluency, comprehension, engagement and satisfaction using Universal Design for Learning and digital storytelling

The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of a novel mobile education application that uses Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and digital storytelling on the reading fluency, comprehension, engagement and satisfaction of children learning to read Arabic. For the purpose of this research, an interactive mobile learning application was developed based on the idea of targeting learners’ individual needs, where students progress from reading single words to sentences and creating their own stories and sharing them on a bespoke website. The participants for this study were second-year primary school children, their parents and their Arabic language teachers from different primary schools in Saudi Arabia. Due to the closure of the schools in Saudi Arabia as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, this study was conducted online. This study employed both qualitative and quantitative approaches to measure the effectiveness of the interactive tool and to obtain knowledge about the pupils' technological backgrounds. The qualitative approach involved online semi-structured interviews for the teachers and online observations of children interacting with the application. The quantitative approach is based on online questionnaires for both the children and their parents to obtain opinions about the system, while the parent survey also examined the children’s prior knowledge of using technology and the home literacy environment. Additionally, the quantitative phase involved pre- and post-tests to assess reading fluency and comprehension of the experimental and control groups before and after the experimental group engaged with the application. The qualitative results showed that the application elicited a high level of engagement and satisfaction; and the quantitative results strongly indicated that children who used the system had increased reading fluency and comprehension compared to the control group. The results of this research strongly indicate that a mobile system based on UDL and digital storytelling can have a significant positive effect on fluency, comprehension, engagement and satisfaction when learning to read Arabic