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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Animoto for Education
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…
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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…
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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…
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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