Digital storytelling as a tool for reflection in virtual reality projects

Reflection is essential for learning and development, especially among middle school students. In this paper, we describe how middle school students can engage in reflective learning by composing digital stories in a project-based learning environment employing virtual reality. Adopting multiple case study methods, we examined the digital stories of five students, together with classroom observations and interviews about their experiences, in order to explore how digital storytelling can allowed students to reflect upon their experiences in a year-end capstone program. Creating digital stories allowed students to 1) reflect on their learning experiences teaching younger students with virtual reality, 2) present their reflections in multiple modalities, and 3) make connections between their present experiences and the past and future. This study demonstrates how digital storytelling can enable multimodal reflection for middle school students, particularly within technology-focused project-based learning environments