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**Project Title:** Using Student Digital Storytelling to Improve Third Grade Student Writing Jean K. Martin This research is designed to determine whether or not the implementation of student digital storytelling in the third grade can contribute to improvements in student writing. Student writing requires strong literacy and language skills, the desire to communicate ideas, and a degree of creativity. For third-grade students, the grade-level writing requirements can be extremely challenging. Student writing is evaluated in the State of Georgia using a traits-based rubric that covers six separate areas: ideas/content, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. When working with students and evaluating their writing samples, it is often clear that there are students who don't understand the expectations for their writing. Many count the number of the words, following the teacher's directions to "write more", but find that what they wrote was not what was expected.
 * Name of Researcher:**
 * Introduction:**

Qualitative research conducted by Sylvester and Greenidge (2009) showed examples of students overcoming specific difficulties in writing through their experiences with digital storytelling. In this research, students recorded their writing and added images that were either selected by or created by the student to illustrate their narrative writing. The results included examples of how this initial digital storytelling project had started the students on the path to improve their writing. By conducting additional research in this area, I hope to increase teacher-interest in digital storytelling as an instructional tool in teaching writing to third-grade students.

Sylvester, R. & Greenidge, W. (2009). Digital storytelling: Extending the potential for struggling writers. The Reading Teacher 63(4),284-295. doi: 10.1598/RT.63.4.3