PEDAGOGICAL GUIDELINES FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATIONAL DIGITAL STORYTELLING ENVIRONMENTS BASED ON A PEDAGOGICAL EVALUATION STAR Panagiotis Psomos, Maria Kordaki Department of Cultural Technology & Communication (GREECE) panagiotis.psomos@aegean.gr, m.kordaki@aegean.gr Abstract This paper focus on the construction of general pedagogical guidelines for the design of Educational Digital Storytelling Environments (EDSE) based on a specific evaluation model, named the DS 'Pedagogical Evaluation Star'. DS 'Pedagogical Evaluation Star' is based on modern social and constructivist views of learning and is consisted of sixteen pedagogical dimensions, namely: collaborative learning, creativity and innovation, multiple representations, motivation, cultural sensitivity, gender equality, cognitive effort, feedback, learner control, flexibility, learner activity, valuation of previous knowledge, sharply-focused goal orientation, experiential value, knowledge organization and metacognition. The proposed guidelines may help the researchers and the designers to take into account the appropriate pedagogical principles in the design of EDSE. Keywords: educational digital storytelling, pedagogical design, pedagogical evaluation. 1 INTRODUCTION Ιn every culture, stories have been shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and to instill moral values [1]. Stories have been used to record important events, celebrate the feats of heroes and heroines, transmit the spirit and facts of a major occurrence, and point out patterns of human experience and behavior [2]. People tell stories in an attempt to come to terms with the world and harmonize their lives with reality [3].Τhe Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer are examples of how powerful storytelling is. Critical thinking skills, vocabulary, and language patterns are enhanced through use of stories. Thus, storytelling is a cornerstone of the teaching profession [2]. Storytelling exists as far as time allows us to remember, while digital storytelling is its modern successor. In fact storytelling and the rapid development of media technology have influenced each other, thus creating a new type of storytelling, digital storytelling. Digital storytelling is combining the art of telling stories with a mixture of digital graphics, text, recorded audio, narration, video and music. Although storytelling is not new, the idea of digital storytelling is new [4]. McDrury & Alterio [5] note that students find stories appealing if they connect with their own experience. Hibbing and Rankin- Erikson [6] as well as Boster, Meyer, Toberto, & Inge [7] have shown that the use of multimedia in teaching helps students retain new information as well as aids in the comprehension of difficult material. Digital storytelling was introduced as a technique to encourage and embed student reflection on the activities in which they were engaged, recognizing that reflection can be enhanced as a collaborative process [5]. Digital storytelling is making its first steps, especially in education and much remains to be done so that the DS becomes a vital part in every day educational practices. This is very important since storytelling is the original form of teaching [8]. In fact, digital storytelling can provide educators with a powerful tool to use in their classrooms. To this end, a number of models have been proposed for the technical and pedagogical evaluation of educational digital storytelling environments [9][10][11]. However, these models are no fully inspired by modern social and constructivist pedagogical ideas but mainly emphasised technical aspects. Recently, an evaluation model named ‘pedagogical evaluation star’ [12] has been proposed for the evaluation of EDSE which is rooted on social and constructivist views of learning. In this paper, we will focus on the said ‘pedagogical evaluation star’ [12] and we will present some general pedagogical guidelines for the design of EDSE arising from it. Here, it is worth noting that, although there have been proposed various digital storytelling environments, there is an absence of a clear pedagogical framework –in terms of guidelines- that can help in the design of educational digital storytelling applications by software designers and developers. Proceedings of EDULEARN12 Conference. 2nd-4th July 2012, Barcelona, Spain. ISBN: 978-84-695-3491-5 4697