Posts made in December 23rd, 2009

Collaborative Digital Storytelling with Storybird

Posted on Dec 23, 2009 in Literacy Resources | 2 comments

I’ve just got back from a Smartboard trainers gathering up in Leeds. It’s always great to get together and share new stuff that we’ve found with everyone else, and learn new things too. Vicki from Shoofly demonstrated Storybird, a website she’d found, and I just had to share it here.

Storybird provides a very user-friendly way of combining images and text to tell a story, and then share that story with other people. You choose images from a huge bank of ready-drawn pictures which also help to provide inspiration for story ideas.

You can also have several users all working on the same Storybird story, which would be a great classroom activity

When you have created a Storybird you can send it to others (via weblink) or use the embed code to embed it into a blog / wiki etc. For example, here’s a ready produced Storybird (not made by me) embedded into a blog page:

Emilie and her Dreams on Storybird

You can also read the stories produced by other people, if you want a little inspiration. It’s a really cute little website and it would be an excellent way of making Big Books to use in the classroom on your IWB.

Go check it out http://storybird.com, and thanks again Vicki for sharing the link.

Update – Thanks to @valleseco for sharing this great wiki of MFL Storybirds created by @wizenedcrone.

Smart Measurement

Posted on Dec 23, 2009 in Numeracy Resources, Resources, Useful Links | 2 comments

Jim Dornberg (@jdornberg) has put together a wiki of links to useful interactive resources for the teaching of measurement.

There are some very cool links which would be useful for supporting primary school maths sessions. The links are mainly flash-based, so are not restricted to just Smartboards – you could use these on any brand of interactive whiteboard.

Visit the wiki here: http://smartmeasurement.wikispaces.com/

Flickr Poet – turn poems into pictures

Posted on Dec 23, 2009 in Digital Media, Literacy Resources | 2 comments

Here’s a great little link I got from the PetaPixel photography blog this morning.

Flickr Poet is a quick way of turning a poem, sentence or chunk of random text into a sequence of Flickr photographs. FlickrPoet is part of Stories In Flight, an ongoing exploration of storytelling in the age of the Internet.

It would be nice if you could specify creative commons images perhaps and also produce a permalink (or a gallery)  so you could share your creations. But if you are using IWB software you could use the camera tool to capture your creation and put it into your notebook file (or the good old Print Screen and Art Program like I did to create the image above)

Go try it out now : http://www.storiesinflight.com/flickrpoet/