Digital storytelling as a whole-class learning activity: Lessons from a three-years project

This paper introduces PoliCultura, a project created by Politecnico di Milano for the Italian schools, which has just completed three years of deployment. Participating classes (with pupils aged between 4 and 18 years) are required to create their own multimedia story, using an authoring-delivery environment (1001stories) provided by Politecnico di Milano. PoliCultura has offered us the opportunity to investigate the prolonged use of digital storytelling authoring tools as a whole-class educational activity in a wide number of real educational settings: approximately 7,620 pupils from 381 classes have been involved in this project since its birth in 2006. From the overall PoliCultura experience and from the wide amount of qualitative and quantitative data collected from participants though online surveys, focus groups, interviews and contextual inquiry activities, we have learned a number of lessons that we discuss in the paper.