Digital Storytelling at School: What Kind of Educational Benefits?

In this paper, we investigate the potential of digital storytelling in the context of formal education for fostering substantial educational benefits. Our discussion is based on a five-year experience with digital storytelling in Italian classes of all school grades (from pre-school) that has involved almost 15,000 students, and on the data from surveys, direct interviews and focus groups with hundreds of teachers. The results show that students do achieve a number of benefits, both direct (i.e., curricular, traditional…) and indirect (i.e., non-curricular, non-traditional, like, for example, a professional attitude). We draw conclusions regarding what we deem to be the key ingredients of this successful experience, among which the concrete implementation in each class stands out as prominent.