From Physical to Digital Storytelling. A Comparative Case in School Education

The advantages of narratives and stories in school teaching are known, however, nowadays the use of information and communication technologies are consolidated with common practices, opening the way to the use of strategies such as storytelling. The research was carried out at the Indoamerica Educational Unit in the 2022–2023 academic period in Ambato-Ecuador. Its main objective was to analyse the practice of reading comprehension based on storytelling in physical and digital format as a strategy in the teaching process in the subject Language and Communication. The study collects information from two groups of 6-year-old students with the same level of schooling (second year of primary school), group one with 60 students and group two with 61 students. The teacher of group 1 used illustrated pictures based on infographics to tell the stories (physical format). The teacher of group 2, on the other hand, used Tiktok as a digital narrative resource (digital for-mato). The central theme of the stories is respect and protection of animals. On the other hand, and beforehand, the teachers have completed some training stages on both physical and digital storytelling techniques. A mixed quantitative-qualitative methodology and a reading comprehension test were used, in addition to assessing the most striking graphic resources in both formats. The results show that students who have used digital storytelling as a learning tool have shown better reading comprehension and in less time, which is due to the use of movement, sound and light in the digital format. The teacher of group 1, on the other hand, finds that the use of storytelling in digital format captures the children's attention and facilitates concentration. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.