This paper focuses on the educational benefits of Digital Storytelling (DST) in the context of a primary school and on the importance of a DST application that supports teaching strategies and pedagogical objectives (as defined by the school curriculum). The work presented here is part of a 4-year longitudinal study aimed at understanding how to design an application that supports collaborative DST as educational practice in schools with children aged 6 to 11. In this paper, we describe how a typical case study has been conducted and how we used the Narrative Activity Model (NAM) as a framework to guide the activity analysis and to organize our findings. The result is a set of users' needs and guidelines for the development of an innovative DST application to be used in a formal learning context. © The Authors.