Digital Storytelling in the Classroom

Check out Samantha Morra’s “8 Steps to Great Digital Stories” in order to get ideas for integration of oral storytelling into your classroom. The author believes that digital storytelling is the “21^st Century version of the age-old art of storytelling.” The difference is that today students can share their stories via video and the Internet worldwide.  Students, however, need a plan of action to help them tell their stories. Morra provides one as she suggests you lead your students through a series of steps that includes thinking of ideas, developing storyboards, gathering input, creating products, and getting feedback. She also notes that great digital stories are usually personal and concise, follow a script, use available materials, involve collaboration, and are based on universal story elements.

Story by Disney

Disney’s free app, “Story," lets you use photos and video on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to create stories. It’s not a game or related to a Disney product; its purpose is to allow you to organize the media you have on your digital devices. Your stories, once complete, can be shared on social media and will look like a book complete with “fluid page turning and animation.” Leah Yamshon of MacWorld in her piece, “Disney Interactive Launches Story, a Non-Disney-Centric Photo App”, says that Story is “very intuitive to use with nice in-app editing features and a stunning final product.” This looks like a great app for schools using iPads in the curriculum.

Digital Storytelling with Multimedia Tools

Mind/Shift recommends what it calls cool, new, and easy-to-use multimedia tools for students.  Meograph (with teacher licenses beginning at $19.99) helps students create multimedia stories with “Meograph Moments” that may feature video, audio, timelines, text, images, maps, links, and student narration about their moments. Zeega, free to individual users, lets students make their own interactive Web stories as they capture content available in the cloud. Zeega stories developed by students may be viewed by others who “click their way through each story, one webpage leading to another. . .  WeVideo, with free and for pay versions, is a video-editing collaboration tool that your students can use to upload media clips and edit them.  A group of students can work on a project at the same time, and projects can be stored in WeVideo’s Google Drive App.

If you are interested in digital storytelling, you’ll want to take a look at the handy Mind/Shift chart that compares the following video editing tools: Windows Live Movie Makers, iMovie11, WeVideo, Zeega, and Meograph.

Perfect Clip Art When You Need It

DOVERPICTURA is the place to check when you need perfect clip art images. Some of the categories you might appreciate are: Holidays, Animals, Fine Art, Historical Periods, Transportation, People, Architecture, Culture, and Silhouettes and Stencils. Go to the site and you’ll receive three free image sheets.  Suppose you are looking for Renaissance images. You can purchase a royalty-free Renaissance image collection of 452 images for $14.99. If you are looking for individual images, let’s say of a butterfly, you can buy one sheet for $.99. (Four hundred ninety butterfly and moth images would cost $15.99.) Individual images in the collections are $.99 up. The images are in jpeg and tiff formats and download directly to your computer. You will love the images made available by DOVERPICTURA because they are beautifully rendered and many are rare and unique.

Qwiki: Best iPad App of 2011

“Qwiki Knows Millions of Things”—that’s what you read when you open the app. When you go to quiki you can search for topics of interest or you can open one of the featured topics. On April 5, 2012, for example, the features included the 2012 Alpine World Cup, cherry blossoms, and the 2011-2012 uprising in Syria. When I opened the Alpine World Cup, a short slideshow with audio described the event and introduced users to some of the top skiers. Once the slideshow was finished, I could select from a number of options related to the event, the places it was held, the World Cup and the skiers.  I could also post what I found on Facebook, Tweet it, email it, or embed it in something I was working on.  Teachers are finding Qwiki a valuable free resource that they can use to help students learn to organize resources for projects, papers, and reports. They also like the ability to embed Qwiki resources in their own materials.