digital storytelling – Page 2

Storybird

September 8, 2009Kelly Tenkely5 Comments9077 views

What it is: Storybird is a fun new collaborative storytelling website. Storybird makes it easy to create and tell stories digitally. Students and teachers can create stories together by combining imaginative artwork and text. The final product can be printed, watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared in an online library with the world. “Storybird promotes imagination, literacy, and self-confidence.” Creating, sharing, and reading Storybird stories is free.

How to integrate Storybird into the classroom: Storybird is an excellent way to get your students enthusiastically writing. The imaginative artwork will have your students creating stories in no time. Storybird stories are meant to be collaborative. Students can work together in teams to create stories. This type of learning through play reminds me of the “lets pretend” stories that students create on the playground. Students will feed off of each others ideas, creating more creative stories and learning together. Storybird is also a fantastic place to create a classroom story, each student can contribute pages to the story. The final product can be easily shared with families and friends in the online library. Storybird can be used by teachers to make ‘special’ stories for students. They can include students as characters, emphasize classroom themes or curriculum, and be created for specific reading levels. Encourage your students to create and share their stories on Storybird, open up your classroom computer during DEAR time for students to read stories their classmates have created.

Tips: Storybird is currently in an open Beta version. Right now all features on Storybird are free. Storybird plans to keep story creation, reading, and sharing as free features. Premium (pay-for) features will be added.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Storybird in your classroom.

UDL Book Builder

July 29, 2009Kelly Tenkely1 Comment3759 views

What it is: UDL Book Builder is a site where you can create your own interactive digital stories. The books have built in coaches that can support diverse learning needs. The coaches direct student learning even when students are working independently. The digital books can include text, images, audio, glossary terms (that are linked within the story), and coaches that can provide hints, prompts, and modeling. The published books can be viewed online, downloaded to a computer, saved to a CD, or shared with others in the UDL library. Both teachers and students can use the UDL Book Builder to create interactive digital stories.

How to integrate UDL Book Builder into the classroom: Use the UDL Book Builder to create interactive stories for your students that meet their specific learning needs. Include students and familiar locations in your stories to boost reading motivation. Students love starring in their own stories. As you are creating a book in the Book Builder, be sure to devleop the coaches within the book. The coaches can offer reading hints, strategies, and model good reading. Start a school library of teacher created digital books. As the digital library is devleoped, be sure to note which reading skills are being emphasized so that other teachers can quickly sort through books that will match their students learning needs and interests. Students can also create digital books from their writing. The writing should be ready to publish (correct spelling, grammar, etc.). These stories can easily be shared online with other students in class, in the school, and with pen pals. UDL Book Builder would be a great tool for creating stories as a class using the interactive whiteboard.

Tips: The UDL Book Builder site has a great section with tips for authors and illustrators using the Builder. These tips are helpful for any adults creating a book, but are also worth sharing with students using the tool.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using UDL Book Builder in your classroom.

Creaza

June 4, 2009Kelly Tenkely2 Comments4068 views

What it is: Creaza is a suite of web-based creativity tools. There are four tools in the Creaza toolbox that will help your students organize knowledge and tell stories in new creative ways. Mindomo is the mind mapping tool. Students can use this tool to organize thoughts, ideas, links, and other information visually. Mindomo is the perfect tool for exploring new material, looking at connections, and organizing thoughts for further development. The mind map topics can contain media files, links, and text. Cartoonist is a cartooning tool that students can use to create multimedia stories. Cartoonist can be used to create comic strips or more personal digital narratives. The finished product can be viewed online or printed out. (Check out the video demo to learn how to use this tool.) Movie Editor helps students produce their own movies based on Creaza’s thematic universes, video, images, and sound clips. Students can use the Movie Editor to edit a short film, create a news cast, a commercial, a film trailer, etc. Movie Editor can import film clips, sound clips and images to tell a story. Audio Editor is the final tool in Creaza’s creative suite. Audio Editor is a tool that allows your students to produce audio clips. Students can use Audio Editor to splice together their own newscasts, radio commercials, radio interlude, etc.

How to integrate Creaza into the classroom: Creaza is a great suite of online tools that allow students to display learning creatively. The Media and Audio editors follow established conventions for sound and media editing complete with timelines. Using this online software will be a nice introduction to more robust media and audio editors. Mindomo is a great way for students connect new and existing knowledge. It is also a nice place for students to plan out a story. Cartoonist and Movie Editor are great tools that provide students with a creative outlet for telling a story. Allow students to show their understanding of a period in history by creating a cartoon about it. Display a new science concept in Movie Editor complete with voice over. Students could create a short video or radio type commercial for a book that they read in place of a traditional book report. The uses for are limitless, you will think of many ways for your students to use this creative suite to display knowledge.

Tips: Cartoonist is the only tool that has a video demo, this is a great way to teach your students how to teach themselves. Encourage students to learn how to use this tool by watching the video demo first and working with the tool. Movie Editor does take a little bit of playing with to figure out how to use it, give your students a day to play with the tools so that they get a handle on how it all works.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Creaza in your classroom.

Myths and Legends

January 16, 2009Kelly Tenkely1 Comment3917 views

What it is: Myths and Legends is an awesome, free, online digital story telling website. I heard about the website through @kjarrett. The story creator lets students combine pictures that they compose with clip art or images that they upload, sound, and words to create a digital story. The stories can be saved, printed, and shared. Students can record themselves reading the story aloud and even add video! The website is pretty comprehensive as far as online digital storytelling tools go, I am impressed!

How to integrate Myths and Legends into the classroom: Myths and Legends is a great way to get your students interested and eager to write. The digital story telling format gives students a unique opportunity to express themselves creatively. Many of your reluctant writers will jump at the chance to create a story in this manner because it doesn’t “feel” like writing. They don’t get stuck looking at that blank piece of paper and feeling overwhelmed by the task ahead of them. I have found that students write more, and the quality of work is better when they create digital stories that are shared later with the whole class. In the one or two computer classroom you can set up a digital storytelling writing center that students can work at, in the lab setting whole classes can create at the same time, and as a whole class with an interactive whiteboard or projector, the entire class can create a story together.

Tips: Each student should sign up and register for a free account so that they can save their work. As a teacher you can also sign up for a school account where you can login and review all of your students work online.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Myths and Legends in your classroom.

Primary Access

October 23, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment1735 views

What it is: Primary Access is a tool I learned about today while attending one of the K12 Online conference sessions. This incredible site has a web-based tool that offers students and teachers simple access to digital images and materials that provides them the opportunity to create personal narratives. The idea behind the site is that if students are offered primary source documents, they develop better historical thinking skills. I highly recommend you watch the presentation on k12 Online, to see just how accurate this belief was in a case study of the site. Students use Primary Access to create digital movies (historical narratives) that help add to meaningful learning experiences. The site is very simple to use, intuitive enough that even a student (or teacher) who has never created a digital movie would be successful.

How to integrate Primary Access into the classroom: Use Primary Access as a tool to bring history to life for your students. Using the site, students can create a short digital movie that explores some event in history. The digital movie will only be 1-3 minutes in length and can contain images, text, movies, and narration recorded in the students own voice. Students have a place to write, research, narrate, view, and search a time line and idea map right in Primary Access. The finished product is educational and entertaining for the creator and viewers. The results with this site are truly amazing! It really does bring history to life.

Tips: It isn’t obvious how to create a teacher account on Primary Access, to create an account go to http://primaryaccess.org/teacher.

Leave a comment and tell us how you are using Primary Access in your classroom.

Smile Box

September 22, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment3099 views

What it is: Smile Box is a free application that I love. The scrapbooker in me loves Smile Box for all of the digital scrapbooking qualities. The teacher in me loves all of the classroom applications that Smile Box could be used for. Smile Box is a free software that lets students combine photos, videos, and music into one amazing multimedia presentation. Smile Box used to only be available for PC’s but now have a Mac version that is outstanding. The Mac version integrates seamlessly with iPhoto and iTunes without any additional plugins! Students can choose from over 700 design templates to use as a base to combine media. The final Smile Box project can be embedded in a blog, sent via email, or printed.

How to integrate Smile Box into the classroom: Smile Box has many classroom applications. The software is a great place for students to do some digital storytelling combining pictures, podcasts, and video. Students could create a weekly paper about the happenings in your classroom, a memory book for each student for the end of the year, etc. Smile Box is also a great place for students to make Mothers/Fathers day cards, Christmas cards, Happy Thanksgiving greeting, etc. Students can also use Smile Box to create rich content reports. For example, instead of writing a paragraph about what they learned while studying about Russia, students could create a media rich postcard about Russia.

Tips: Smile Box is simple to use and very intuitive. Students will love creating with

Smile Box!

Leave a comment and share how you are using Smile Box in your classroom.

Animoto for Education

August 7, 2008August 7, 2008Kelly Tenkely1 Comment4891 views

What it is: There are some really neat online tools that I find that live in my Google Notebook for a long time (I have upward of 800 links for educational websites yet to post to iLearn Technology…and growing daily!) Some get pushed aside for my newest cool find, and some move to the bottom of the list because, while they may have educational value, they are not intended JUST for education and may have some questionable user created content that I wouldn’t want my students to stumble on. Animoto was one of these sites for me. It is an amazing and COOL tool but wasn’t necessarily geared just toward education. I got a fun email today that Animoto now has an education only site! Animoto for education is a site where students can create compelling and impressive digital content quickly and easily. It is the perfect addition to your classroom’s digital storytelling kit. It is very intuative and easy to use, in no time students have digital videos that they created! This is also an amazing place for you, the teacher, to create a video that will bring your lessons to life. You can post or embed videos on your class site or even, are you ready for this?, download for in class presentations. Animoto for Education makes it simple to mix audio and visual for a dynamic, unique presentation in no time. It is so easy to use that students could create a complete animoto presentation in one computer class.

How to integrate Animoto for Education into the classroom: Animoto for education is a great place for you to teach from. Make any lesson come to life with audio and visual, use at the beginning of the day as a ‘teaser’ for what your students can look forward to learning each day or use to teach complex concepts in history, math, science, or character education. Students will respond to new media in the classroom. Allow your students to display knowledge of a concept using Animoto. Use Animoto for Education for a beginning of the year get to know you activity. Students can each create an Animoto showcasing who they are through pictures and music. Animoto presentations are quicker to create than traditional PowerPoint type presentations making them ideal for digital storytelling in the classroom setting. Because Animoto is completely web-based, students can create videos from school and continue working on them at home. The ability to download videos is outstanding…students could save their work for offline viewing too!

Tips: Children under 13 can’t sign up for their own account. To use Animoto for Education with your students you can register your students with dummy accounts using dummy email addresses. Animoto is private to your school. This means that other people can’t come accross student videos or contact students through the site.

Leave a comment and share how you are using Animoto for Education in your classroom.

Ed.VoiceThread

August 5, 2008August 5, 2008Kelly Tenkely2 Comments3509 views

What it is: I have posted about Voice Thread in the past, but Voice Thread has added a new education community that has some pretty incredible features. Ed.VoiceThread is a secure collaborative network designed specifically for the k-12 school environment. Teachers and students can collaborate around almost any type of media including voice, text, webcam, and drawing commentary in a secure environment. Access is restricted to k-12 educators, students, and administrators to ensure safe classroom collaboration. Ed.VoiceThread is an accountable environment, which means that all users are responsible for their content and behavior. Some added features that you will find on Ed.VoiceThread are, students have individual accounts that are easily viewable to educators, students can create, edit, and manage their own portfolio, students cannot add contacts or send invitations to any users outside of the Ed.Voice Thread community, and they cannot view any content that is not created by an Ed.Voice Thread member. Teachers can quickly view and access all students’ Voice Threads. Voice Threads can be made private or public depending on the assignment and requirements. Ed.VoiceThread comes in two packages one free and the other, called Pro, for $60/year. Free users can only create 3 VoiceThreads, have 75 MB of storage, no uploading of MP3 comments, 30 min of webcam commenting, advertising will be present, single file size limit of 25 MB, and no downloads of the media. In the Pro version, students can create an unlimited number of Voice Threads, get 10GB of storage, can upload MP3 comments, have unlimited webcam commenting, 30 archival movie exports, no advertising, single file size limit of 100MB and allows downloads of media.

How to integrate Ed.VoiceThread into the classroom: Ed.VoiceThread is the ideal place for students and teachers to collaborate and interact with digital media. The added functionality for schools with Ed.VoiceThread is very useful. Students can use Ed.VoiceThread to create digital stories, documentaries, practice and document language skills, explore geography and culture, solve math problems, and much more. As a teacher, I like VoiceThread as a place to teach. Because everything is web-based, you can upload a days lessons to Ed.VoiceThread for students to refer to and collaborate with while doing homework. I well remember the days when I would sit in math class learning the days equations. Everything made perfect sense to me while I was sitting in the classroom watching problems being worked. But at home, with no guide homework seemed impossible. Ed.VoiceThread makes you your students personal tutor. The self paced learning is amazing! I love giving students tools that allow them to be in charge of their own learning. Is there any better lesson in life than knowing how to learn?

Tips: Try out the free Ed.VoiceThread account and see how it could work for your classroom. If you are like me, it becomes addicting and 3 VoiceThreads won’t be enough!

Leave a comment and share how you are using Ed.VoiceThread in your classroom.

Ideas from TIE

June 25, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment1992 views

Well, now that I am rested up and my head has stopped spinning with all of the info. I took in yesterday at TIE, I am ready to share some goodies! Jason Ohler was the keynote speaker…I have to say, definitely the highlight for me. His presentation was on digital storytelling. While I have dabbled in digital storytelling with my students, Jason has jumped in with both feet! Jason is quite the storyteller himself and had us captivated as he reminded us of the importance of developing creativity in our students. As Jason presented, I was madly jotting down notes and have some great quotes to share.

“Literacy today is consuming and producing the media forms of today. Students need to be able to write whatever they read (or consume).” I love this, our students are not content with simply taking in literacy, they want to be creators and inventors of their own literacy. This has expanded beyond simply writing… think about your students obsession with You Tube.

This one is my favorite “Intelligence is measured by your desire to learn.” I think this is my new life motto. I need to plaster this all over my classroom. No Child Left Behind does nothing for intelligence!

“You don’t have to be a technician magician…know free labor when you see it and let the kids do it.” In other words, you don’t have to know everything or anything about technology. Your students know how to use technology, let them be the experts and teach each other (and you!)

Jason has an amazing website dedicated to digital storytelling. You may need to dedicate a chunk of time to this site, trust me you will end up spending time here (hooray summer break, you do have time after all!) You can even check out some clips of Jason’s keynote speeches on You Tube, these are linked from his presentation page. Also, be sure to spend some time on the Resources and Projects pages. You will find lots of treats for the taking!

Are you already digital storytelling? What advice do you have for those who are thinking about taking the plunge?

More tomorrow, I bought Jason’s book “Digital Storytelling in the Classroom” and it is calling my name! Happy learning you intelligent readers you! 🙂

TIE Conference

June 24, 2008Kelly TenkelyLeave a Comment1880 views

Hi all! Today I was at the TIE Conference in beautiful Copper Mountain, Colorado…a seriously perfect day 🙂 Great Keynote, and learned about Digital Storytelling and learned Flash for the first time, very exciting! I’ve been going since early this morning so I will have to postpone a post with substance for later when I can form coherent thoughts. TTFN