What it is: I am constantly learning about cool new website tools for the classroom from my PLN (Personal Learning Network), today I learned about an animated comic creator called Stage’d from fellow Blogging Alliance member @MrR0gers. Stage’d is a tool that helps students to tell digital stories in a new 3-d way. Students can create a stage full of characters and dialogue as if they are directing their own digital play. They can choose characters, costumes, animations, set design and provide characters with dialog. When the 3-d comic has been saved, it can be emailed or linked to with a unique url. Stage’d is perfect for use in any classroom, to save a comic requires no personal identifying information or even an email address. All students have to do is type in the name of the director (first name only or a pseudonym).
How to integrate Stage’d into the classroom: Stage’d is a seriously fun creation tool, students are going to love directing their own 3-d comic plays. Stage’d makes a great digital story telling tool.
Students can:
- Publish their own fiction (or non-fiction) writing pieces as a 3-d play
- Re-tell a story to demonstrate comprehension
- Illustrate vocabulary words
- Illustrate historical events
- Create mock public service announcements
- Create mocumentaries
- “Interview” an important person of interest
- Create short persuasive video commercials
- Illustrate story problems in math
- Practice a foreign language dialogue and vocabulary
Stage’d is very easy to use and the results are absolutely fantastic. Create your own Stage’d creations to introduce a new topic or concept to your students. This is a fun introduction that will grab their attention in a hurry.
Tips: The creators of Stage’d are constantly adding new features and options so check back often.
Please leave a comment and share how you are using Stage’d in your classroom.
Thanks Kelly. I noticed that this requires you to install something called the Unity Web Player – at least on my Mac. This would be important to know if you’re looking to put it on a school district network.
Love your instructional suggestions!
And here I thought I’d discovered this one. I should have known you’d find it first. Its pretty cool though right, and the 3d looks pretty nice.
Another fabulous way to get students writing and producing! They are going to adore this.
This is such a great tool. I’m going to share this with my class Thursday. They need to create projects for The Catcher in the Rye and this could be great for some of them. Thanks for the share! 🙂
I had seen Stag’d while I was at D’volver but it seemed quite clunky. Obviously they’ve made improvements so I will go back and investigate soon.
Thanks, Kelly! (I will try again with comments, see if i can get your blog to accept them!)
Hi,
Thanks for the great write-up!
We’ve definitely hoped that Stage’D could be useful in an educational setting, aside from hopefully just being fun :D.
Progress in development can be a bit slow, because sadly it’s not paying the bills and is a spare time project. That said, any feedback you or your readers have about how to improve it for classroom use would be great to hear. It would help us prioritize what we do have time to work on.
Feel free to drop me an e-mail with suggestions or stumbling blocks you’ve run into and naturally we have pages on facebook, and twitter.
Thanks again, it’s great encouragement to read articles like this.
cheers
Eric
Eric, thank you for your willingness to ask for educator experiences and user input! We appreciate the spare time project as it is a great tool for digital story telling.
You did discover this one Chris, learned about it from a tweet you sent out this morning. Thank you!!
This is one of the grooviest things you’ve shared lately – love it!
Another great idea for digital storytelling, or reader response, or …. lot of another projects! Thanks Kelly for pointing it out! Yay for the Blogging Alliance!!