Interesting Writing Prompts and Story Starters
Here’s an interesting website which contains a series of different images which can be used as writing prompts or story starters. The site is produced by Luke Neff who uses these images with his own class.
Each one involves a thought-provoking image and a question/scenario. Take a look here: http://writingprompts.tumblr.com/
If you want to make your own, then you could use sites such as The Big Picture to find powerful images and combine them with a question of your own.Use the screen capture tool to grab the image and bring it into your IWB software, or copy/paste into PowerPoint.
You could also use a Flickr search engine or look at Flickr Groups such as FlickrSoup for the Soul or Tell a Story in Five Frames.
If you know of other great story starter sites, let me know in the comments.
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Draw a Stickman
Draw a Stickman is a really cute little website. You start by drawing a stickman and then… well go see for yourself.
This would be great on an interactive whiteboard to help with the drawing – but works just as well with a mouse.
Take a look at http://www.drawastickman.com/
Thanks to my colleague Laura O’Halloran for posting the link on Facebook earlier today.
Read MoreToonlet – Digital Storytelling with a Comic Strip
Toonlet allows students to create their own comic strips populated by their own characters. They can choose how many frames they want for their cartoon, and the simple editor makes it easy to drop their characters into a story.
Once the characters have been created, the strip editor lets them tell their story by simply typing into the speech bubbles.
The finished strip can then be shared via direct link to the comic, or embedded into a blog/wiki. You can also save the strip as a png file.
Registration is needed to use the site to create comics, but it’s free to do so.
There are lots of different ways to use this in class. You could write simple dialogue between several characters to tell a story – in language lessons create conversations in that language. Use for revision to explain processes or topics. Create interviews with famous people from history or characters from books that the students are studying. Recreate scenes from classic tales in their own words. And many more. Here’s a nice guide to using Toonlet to create strips.
Toonlet would also be good for creating avatars, even if you don’t want to make a whole comic. Create characters in the character creator and right-click/save as a jpg.
For more digital storytelling resources, take a look at my delicious list: http://www.delicious.com/dannynic/digitalstorytelling
Hat tip to David Hopkins for the link via his blog.
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Capzles – digital storytelling and presentation tool
Capzles is an interesting digital storytelling tool that allows users to tell a story using pictures, video clips, audio tracks and text. Users are given the ability to place this media, called “moments”, together chronologically in a timeline.
Creating a “Capzle” is easy via the website. You can upload photographs and videos or blog directly onto the site. You have a lot of control over the background colors and themes to be used with the capzle. Users can also add an audio track to be played in the background as their capzle is viewed.
There is also a Capzle iPhone app which lets you upload images from your phone straight into a Capzle.
I had a quick play with the site and produced a short test capzle : View my Test Capzle Here
Adding video is tricky in that you cannot just import files from YouTube. You need to upload video files. Maybe in the future this feature will be added. This does limit it’s use as a way of collating resources that students have found online on a given topic.
The terms of the Capzle website state that under 13s cannot register, so this is something to use with children above that age. There are social network aspects to the site so it’s best to restrict it to older children.
For educational use, this is another tool which could be used to produce simple presentations – collating images, videos and text into one presentation document. Pupils could produce Capzles on particular topics in the same way they might produce a powerpoint or prezi presentation.
Capzles looks like an interesting tool – and it’s worth bookmarking as another online presentation solution.
Read MoreThe Land of Me – A Digital Storybook
The Land of Me is a fabulous collection of creative games and activities packaged as a digital story book. The software lets you journey through six unique chapters with three intrepid friends, Buddy Boo the bear, Eric the raccoon and Willow the owl.
Land of Me is specifically designed with Early Years in mind but would also find a place in KS1 or SEN classrooms. And it works wonderfully on an IWB, or can be used ona computer with LSA support. You can read more about how it has been designed for the classroom on the Land of Me website.
The Land of Me contains over 100 printable activities, games and puzzles so that you and the children can continue the fun away from the computer. Each chapter has it’s own collection of ‘things to do’ from finger puppets and masks to matching games and join-the-dots!
These printed activities are a great addition to the digital resources which carry on the learning away from the board. I like this blended-media approach with the technological and traditional activities supporting each other, which is why I like the ShooFly resources for doing the same thing.
You can buy Land of Me as a boxed DVD or download direct to your computer. Each chapter costs £6.95 or you can get all 6 chapters for £29.95
I found Land of Me to be an enchanting piece of software. The artwork and animations were wonderfully done, with a lot of attention to detail – keep an eye on the backgrounds!I’ll certainly be showing it to my PGCE students as something they should investigate.
If you teach Early Years or Lower Primary then I would definitely recommend you take a look at Land of Me. And definitely download the free chapter and see what you think!
Read MoreOnline Audio Stories
Online Audio Stories provide free downloadable audio books for children.
With a wonderful selection of short stories for kids and bedtime stories, their free storytelling audio books for children are a delight. You can download the audio as an mp3 file and play on a computer, or transfer to a portable mp3 player.
Stories include classic tales from Aeosop, Brothers Grimm, Edward Lear and Hans Christian Andersen. It’s well worth a visit. Take a look here.
And don’t forget if you like these, you’ll also like StoryNory: http://storynory.com/
Read MoreCollaborative Digital Storytelling with Storybird
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.
Read MoreFlickr Poet – turn poems into pictures
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/
Read MoreCreaza – cartoon, audio, video, mindmap creator
Creaza is a free online suite of applications that lets you create online cartoons, edit movies, edit audio and create mindmaps.It’s not fre for the full version, but you can try it out and do quite a bit with the free demo version.
You use the toolbox along with various themes such as historical periods, fairy-tales, fantasy worlds. This would make a great digital storytelling resource for literacy, but also for history or geography.
Creaza integrates professional and user-generated content, creative tools and a social network in a new and innovative way. It’s been nominated for a BETT award this year too, so it’s obviously highly thought of.
Like other “cloud” applications all you need to use it is Internet access, a web browser, and the Flash plug-in. Creaza is available for PC, MAC, and Linux.
It’s free to register and use the demo version, so it’s definitely well worth checking out. If you want to be able to export your creations to your computer then you need to pay to upgrade to the full version. http://www.creaza.com
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About Me
Danny Nicholson : Educator, Science teacher, ICT Consultant, PGCE lecturer, Author and Web2.0 / SMART Masters/ Interactive Whiteboard Trainer. Contact me for any training requests. 
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