According to David Jakes Digital storytelling is "the one of the most powerful powerful 21st-century learning processes available to teacher and students." A digital stoy harnesses the interest of the student and allows him to tell a story of his choosing using multimedia to an audience. Digital stories are experiences that the student puts together using photos, video, animation, and or audio. It can be still images only, or graphics collected from the web put together to tell as story, or a combination of all the mentioned elements above.

Digital stories usually last for 2-3 minutes. They can be created using special storytelling software, iMove, powerpoint, wikis, Flickr, or video. Often student choose to make their story from a personal experience or from something that concerns them, which allows them to express in imagery their feelings and point of view. Showing their final products to friends or on the web, allows them to show pride in their final product and grow in self-confidence. Digital storytelling allows students to contribute to the conversation even if they are not good at the language.

Studies have shown that ESL students grow in their anlytical thinking, confidence, language arts, and writing skills when working on projects using digital storytelling.

Digital storytelling also contributes to improved interaction with peers as projects can be collaborative or if personal, as they are allowed to share with peers their final product.

In digital storytelling students get engaged in their reading and their research as they are to choose a topic for their story. THey ecome very enthusiastic about thes projects. This improves their reading skills as they are motivated. As they write their script for the story they get engages in writing, and as they gather music, video, photos, and graphics for their story they get engaes in research. Students often work much harder on digital stoytelling projects than on each of the components in a traditional setting according to Gwen Solomon and Lynne Schrum (Web 2.0 new tools, new schools - 2007.)

Digital storytelling is very flexible and may be incorporated into many different subjects: Math students may be asked to explain statistics, in science it can explain how something develops, in language arts and writing in can be used to tell a personal story. Imagination is the limit for its use.