Digital Storytelling in Initial Teacher Training

Within an increasingly interconnected society, the Internet and digital technologies are configured as fundamental social resources which can play an important role in fostering critical thinking and active citizenship. This, the conscious participation of citizens in these environments is essential for democracies to be viable, sustainable and functioning. Digital citizenship courses represent the most adopted solutions to educate people in the critical and responsible use of the Internet. The main objective of a digital citizenship education is making people autonomous in the use of the Internet in order to promote individual as well as collective happiness, well-being and prosperity. In line with what has been described, a digital storytelling activity was undertaken in the 2022/2023 academic year with the aim of conveying the themes of digital citizenship by creating interesting, exemplary stories with a social message to explain ethics computer technology. More specifically, this contribution will first describe the collaborative writing and digital storytelling activity which involved 201 future teachers attending the Master’s Degree Course in Primary Education Sciences. Subsequently, the results of the evaluation of digital stories conducted through the Digital Story Assessment Scale (Ozcan et al., 2016) will be presented. Creating and sharing stories about informatics ethics and how individuals should act in virtual environments will be beneficial in terms of learning, adopting and applying these behaviors. The results of an online focus group session carried out at the end of the activity are reported. The participants highlighted how through collaborative writing and Digital Storytelling they had the opportunity to develop useful skills for their professional future, so as to conjugate technical and pedagogical aspects to ethical and civic ones in the use of media.