Beyond Digital Stories: Crafting Digital Compositions for Opinion Writing

Digital storytelling helps twenty-first-century learners use current technologies to construct meaning, connect in-school to out-of-school experiences, and expand audiences. Often, these digital stories reflect narratives of students’ lives, but ample opportunities also exist for students to use this medium across genres and for social action. The author describes how his fifth-grade students created multimodal, digital compositions for opinion writing in which they incorporated written text, images, music, and voice narration, addressed relevant topics in their lives, and inspired change in their communities. Common Core Standards and current research which support multimodal compositions are shared throughout the article.