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Drawing on Children’s Funds of Knowledge through Digital Storytelling

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study that explored the affordances of a digital storytelling activity for two beginning writers. The two children who participated in this study were in grade one and both attended separate privately funded HebrewEnglish school in Canada. Participatory observations, semistructured interviews and reflective field notes were employed as data collection methods. The children carried out a digital storytelling activity that involved planning out the story, enacting the story, creating and editing a storyboard with cameras and computers, and lastly, celebrating the stories they produced with family, friends and educators. We found that the digital storytelling activity encouraged the children to take risks with their writing, the children leveraged digital tools to proofread, edit as well as revise their stories, and used various modes of expression to craft their narratives. Our research makes a contribution to Education scholarship by examining how children’s funds of knowledge about technology contributes to the narratives children produce as well as their desire to produce them, with a particular focus on digital storytelling.