Creative Writing, Digital Storytelling and the Arts in EFL: The Case of Storybird

In the context of foreign language education new technologies have transformed traditional teaching into a learning experience where students make use of a variety of digital tools in order to create authentic multimodal texts. The new digital environments should not, however, replace the students' fundamental cognitive skills but promote the basic principles of the humanities combined with digital technology. This will contribute to a holistic approach of foreign language teaching and encourage multiliteracy. The aim of the following paper is to explore the various advantages of the digital tool Storybird which enables the implementation of the pedagogical principles of creative writing, digital storytelling and the contribution of the Arts in the learning procedure. Creative writing disengages the foreign language teaching from the passive transfer of knowledge and engages it with the students' imagination and creativity. Digital storytelling reinforces the interactive nature of foreign language teaching and transforms the target language into a tool for digital communication. The pictures in Storybird facilitate the connection between the classroom and the Arts and cultivate the students' aesthetic experience promoting differentiated instruction in EFL