Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Technology Topics: Storybird, Collaborative Storytelling

I'm very excited to share this website. Storybird is a site where anyone can go to create stories using awesome ready-made illustrations. All you have to do is pick out an artist, sift through their artwork, drag-and-drop the images you want, and write your own story around the pictures. The illustrations are by some amazing new artists from around the world. Right now I'm working on a Storybird using pictures from an artist in Belgium named Sebastiaan Van Doninck.

The people at Storybird are marketing this toward teachers and students for classroom use, but anyone can sign up for a free account and add their stories to the Storybird public library. Teachers can create a classroom on the website and set their students up with logins. Teachers can also create public or private assignments for their students to complete. When the student logs in, the assignment will show up in their personalized  dashboard. This could be a great activity for classes of any level. This may be the perfect thing for homeschooling parents who are looking for fun assignments to get their students involved in writing.

When creating a story, you can even invite a collaborator to work with you on your storybird.  Each collaborator can take a turn until the story is complete. Once you've completed your story, with or without a collaborator, you can publish it to the Storybird site and get feedback from the social network of other creators who have used Storybird.

Log onto Storybird and be sure to share a link of your creation in the comment section here so we can see!

Here is a sample of one touching Storybird story created with the site.

Ribbons and Strings by FogCat on Storybird


2 comments:

  1. Fantastic! (=
    I see in your profile that you're a great promoter of literacy.
    My writing group is hosting a writing conference for teens and are flying out some of their fave authors for the event. We are eager to get kids involved in reading and writng too!

    www.writerscubed.com

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  2. That's great! It sounds like you have a pretty happening writer's group. :-) Where are you located?

    ReplyDelete