Digistories.

Reading or listening to stories has always been a very unique kind of learning tool for all of us. I think that people of all ages love to both listen to and tell stories to others. Nowadays we can make the process of telling stories more impressive, powerful, useful and motivating due to digital technologies.
I remember the times when my mom and grandma told me different kinds of stories and I always tried to imagine that beautiful world that was created by their words. But now the world of digital technologies gives us the opportunity to create stories with visuals, sound, and motion. All this factors make the stories more authentic, motivating and engaging.
One of the most significant benefits that digistories give the students is that they become producers, i.e. they do all the work themselves, they search, download, choose, record, type, add and do other kinds of functions all themselves and finally create a whole story. Thus, there is a diversity in the style of the learning of the students, i.e. they are not always consumers, but also producers.
According to different research, digistories affect on the students' learning and engagement very positively. They foster active and communicative learning. Besides, it give the learners the opportunity to share their personal stories with their audience, stories that they cannot express or share in real communication. It means that they combine their knowledge gained in the class and what they know outside the class. It also gives the students their own voice, i.e. by creating a story of their own they acquire the sense of ownership and also self-confidence. Other important skills that digistories can develop are as follows: the ability to actively use digital technologies, to become more creative, to retain their knowledge longer, etc.
However, in one of the research there was a question unidentified, whether digistories foster critical thinking or not. In my opinion, they do affect on critical thinking, because when making the stories through different technologies (be it power point, movie maker, storyboard, etc.) they have to think about who are their audience, about the succession of the visuals, about the corresponding music, the content of the story and other kinds of issues.
Finally, digistories affect on the students' linguistic skills; they become better readers, writers and speakers and listeners of the language.
For watching some examples of digistories, please visit the following websites:

• http://mashable.com/2012/01/31/digital-storytelling/
• http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/

And this is a sample of digistory created by one of my friends: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FbeV9GZLK7s#t=0