digital story – iLearn Technology

Story Time for Me: Digital Children’s Books

April 11, 2011April 11, 2011Kelly Tenkely5 Comments3923 views

What it is: Story Time for Me is a beautiful collection of digital children’s books for primary students in kindergarten through second grade. Each story includes charming illustrations, animation and professional narration with music and sound effects. Activities accompany every story that encourage imagination and creativity (these are coming soon!). The stories have been developed to teach important values through positive moral themes. Story Time for Me currently has a library of over 30 books and growing. Next Friday (April 22, 2011) Story Time for Me will be launching free personalized activity books where students can become the star of a book.

Students can choose to read each story with or without narration, with or without animation and choose to highlight the words as they are read.

I can’t tell you how impressed I am with this free digital story site. It expands your classroom library, encourages a focus on character development and invigorates children to read more.

How to integrate Story Time for Me into the classroom: Story Time for Me expands your classroom library with winsome digital stories that your students will love. Story Time for Me makes a great reading center on classroom computers. Because students have the option to read with narration or independently, it meets the needs of both strong and developing. Each story reinforces positive character education values often dealing with friendship. These stories are a wonderful way to begin class discussions about friendship and empathy with students. If you have an interactive whiteboard or projector-connected computer, the stories can be used as a whole-class “big book”.

When the personalized versions are available, give your students the opportunity to star in their own story. These personalized stories would make a fun beginning of the year activity as a way to welcome students to a new grade, or end the school year with a personalized story they can enjoy all summer.

Tips: I learned about Story Time for Me from @2sparkley’s blog, Bits and Pieces Place. If it isn’t a blog you subscribe to, it should be!

Story Time for Me is completely free, the more visitors they can attract the more stories they will be able to add to the library. You can help them by spreading the word to family and friends on Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Story Time for Me in your classroom!

Little Bird Tales

February 25, 2011Kelly Tenkely6 Comments4647 views

What it is: I am late on this post, but it is too good to skip a mention! Little Bird Tales is a new way to digital story tell with primary students. With Little Bird Tales, students can upload their own artwork, record their voice, add text and email their finished creations to family and friends. Sign up on Little Bird Tales requires an email address for verification purposes. This can be a parent or teacher email address (the site is geared for 3 to 14-year-old children so a student address is not necessary). Little Bird Tales includes a built-in art pad where students can create pictures online. They also have the option to upload photographs and images they have created offline. Each page give students a place to add a picture, text and voice recording. Finished books can be saved and accessed online or sent via email.

How to integrate Little Bird Tales into the classroom: Little Bird Tales is a brilliant option for digital storytelling in the primary classroom. I love that it includes both online and offline student creations, as well as student voice recordings. Students can use Little Bird Tales for creative writing and imaginative stories, as a way to reflect on learning, or as a keepsake for parents. Students can take pictures of science experiments and create a digital science journal detailing the experiment with text and student voice reflections included.

Use Little Bird Tales to create whole class stories where each student contributes a page. This type of book can be made over a few weeks using classroom computers as a writing center. This would be a fun way to create an A to Z type book of learning, reflections by students after a unit, a 100 day book, fact vs. opinion book, an interactive glossary, a class book of poems, a phonics book, or a class book about a field trip that students took. The finished product can be shared with parents and families easily through an email. For a back to school night activity, take a picture of each student to add to a class book and record students sharing what their favorite part of the school day is. This same idea could be used in preparation for parent-teacher conferences. Students can upload pictures of their best school work, record thoughts about why they are proud of the work they did, and add reflections in the text field. These can be shared as a starting point for conferences, at the end of the conference, parents have a keepsake.

Because of the voice recording capabilities, Little Bird Tales, would be a great way for students to practice a foreign language. They can illustrate a word or phrase accompanied by the audio. Classes could work together to create a “living” digital glossary.

Do you have a planned absence coming? Why not create a digital story that your substitute can share with students? Upload pictures that support learning, text, and your voice.

Tips: If you have parent email addresses in Google, Yahoo, or Outlook, they can be directly imported into Little Bird Tales as contacts.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Little Bird Tales in your classroom!

ePub Bud: ePublish Yourself

April 22, 2010April 26, 2010Kelly Tenkely2 Comments28045 views

What it is: ePub Bud is the YouTube of Children’s eBooks. The site is YouTube-like in that anyone can create and share their own children’s ebooks. The goal of this not-for-profit website is to provide an easy way to find, share, and self-publish children’s ebooks. ePub Bud lets you create an ebook for a small audience, or for the whole world, digitize a real book by mailing in a physical children’s book and having it “digitized” for the iPad, upload an ebook file that you can read on the iPad, or download an eBook (classics and books others have shared). Best of all, everything you do on ePub Bud is completely free!

How to integrate ePub Bud into the classroom: ePublishing is quickly becoming popular and more eReader devices are showing up in the classroom. While there is nothing like holding a paper back book in your hand, their is also nothing like holding a good ebook in your hands. Whatever we can do as teachers to get students reading, I say use it! Use ePub Bud in your classroom to “publish” student stories. The books can be shared with other students, parents, and schools. Publishing an eBook of their own is highly motivating, and will have your students eager to write. With ePub Bud, your students could construct their own text books. Have them create ebooks about what they are learning to share with others.

If you have access to the iPod Touch, iPhone, or iPad, consider sending in some of the books from your classroom libary to be digitized. Many sites have free ebooks for kids, make them iPad, iPod, or iPhone friendly by uploading them to ePub Bud. You can also search the extensive collection of classic children’s eBooks that are on ePub Bud and download those for students to read. You will find children’s favorites from Beatrix Potter, Lewis Carrol, A.A. Milne, Frances Margaret Fox, Milton Goldsmith, and many, many more.

This is such a neat website and it is really and truly free. You won’t even find advertisements on this site!

Tips: If you send in a book to be digitized, ePub Bud cannot send the original back for copyright purposes.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using ePub Bud in your classroom.

Storybird

September 8, 2009Kelly Tenkely5 Comments20145 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.

Ed.VoiceThread

August 5, 2008August 5, 2008Kelly Tenkely2 Comments3802 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.