Digital Storytelling as a Means of Teaching Media to Preschoolers.

Storytelling has been proved to have numerous benefits to education; some of the most crucial are: the stimulation of reflective thinking, facilitation of group cohesion, influence on the direction of learning, the linking to the empowerment of studentsetc (Flanagan 2015).Digital storytelling (DS) is not a new idea as its roots lie in the Digital Storytelling movement in the 1980s whose cofounders created the Center for Digital Storytelling that provided training and assistance to people interested in creating and sharing their personal narratives (Robin 2008). DS has been used widely in all levels of formal education (Blas, Garzotto, Paolini, & Sabiescu 2009), of adult education (Flanagan 2015) but also in a great variety of lessons such as mathematics and geometry (Yuksel-Arslan, Yildirim & Ross 2016). Needless to say, that digital storytelling has also been used to teach values in special education (Skouge & Rao 2009) and also to highlight media literacy in preschool education (Blas & Boretti 2009). Research has found that digital storytelling has substantial educational benefits for preschoolers such as the fostering of the ability to narrate, to work as a group, to increase the sense of self responsibility and meta-cognition of preschoolers' own performance (Blas & Boretti 2009,49). Moreover, it has also proved to be an alternative problem-based learning tool for enhancing young children's motivation; an impetus for change in teachers' practices; and last but not least a challenging task for preschoolers (Yuksel-Arslan, Yildirim & Ross 2016). Within this context, the aim of this study is to achieve greater comprehension of how digital storytelling, within preschool education, can contribute to enhance the media learning experience of preschoolers. DS is actually a basic function of every traditional or new medium. The combination of DS with media education will most probably prove to be a successful experiment. The research questions that the field study will focus on are the following two: Why digital storytelling is suitable for preschool media education? How can we enrich media education with teaching media ethics through DS? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]