The Promotion of Originality Perceived in Two Multimodal Storytelling Applications: Storybird and Scratch

Abstract

This mixed research aimed to determine if, in their initial training, teaching students consider Scratch and Storybird, digital storytelling applications, as contributing to promoting originality after an intervention in which they previously experimented with them. It was studied whether they considered it convenient to encourage children’s creativity by combining them to create stories in Spanish and English (as EFL) and then having the teacher adapt these two applications. The participants included 134 university students, teachers in initial training at Huelva’s Campus in Spain. The quantitative results as a whole showed significant differences regarding the different dimensions of originality analysed. In the qualitative ones, it was recognised that these apps encourage cognitive development, creativity, learning, communicative competence, and learning attitude, recognising the apps as didactic tools. When cross-examining the data, it was deduced that the digital storytelling applications preferably provide the benefits of encouraging, in a specific way, originality, imagination, and the production of stories in a multimodal manner. Thus, the emerging variables are cognitive.