Thursday, December 27, 2018

Thing 6: Digital Storytelling

I chose digital storytelling for my first thing this year because it is something I've been doing intermittently with my students for the past year anyway. Many of my older students love animation, graphic novels, and comics, so this is perfect for them. One of my 5th graders even recommended a few animations sites to me last week. Unfortunately none of them were free, but I appreciated her effort!

One of the first digital storytelling tools I used with my students was one of the ones listed in this lesson. Make Belief Comix. This is one of my favorite websites to use when I need a spur of the moment activity for students when I am absent, most of a class is absent, or whatever other reason. It's very easy to use and my students love creating their own comics. My favorite two things about it are that it is web based and no accounts are required.

While Make Belief Comix is great for a one time class every so often, my favorite digital storytelling tool I've found is Scratch 3.0. For the past month I've had my students in grades 3-6 create their own animations using the beta version and I have been very impressed with what they've done. Google created a bunch of how-to videos on how to create animations that are very helpful. I knew very little about Scratch and even less about Scratch 3.0 when we got started, but all of us worked together to figure it out. They love figuring things out before me! More information on that can be found here. An animation created by one of my students can be found here.

For this activity I did look at a few other animation tools including Animoto, Adobe Spark, Moovly, Powtoon, StoryBird, StoryBoard That, Pixar in a Box, and Toondoo.

Animoto looks like it does a lot. I will have to explore that one more. I was disappointed that a lot of the templates in Powtoon were not available with the free version, which is something I know would frustrate my students. I wish they just wouldn't show up on the free version. For that reason I could sooner see myself using Moovly. Moovly does, however, look like it's geared toward older students.

Adobe Spark was extremely easy to use and I can see using that to have students make posters, flyers, and info graphics for various projects. Last year my 5th and 6th grade students researched food from European countries and created menus. They could've used Adobe Spark for that. Here is a quick poster I made (10 points to Hufflepuff for anyone who gets the reference).


StoryBird looks fantastic! That is definitely something I plan to explore more and use with my older students first and then perhaps my younger ones. StoryBoard That's free version looks too limited.

Pixar in a Box looks like a great addition to any storytelling unit, whether it is digital or not.

Finally, I explored Toondoo. It is very similar to Make Belief Comix, except it requires an account. I found it simple to use, albeit a bit slow to load. I think I'll stick with Make Belief Comix. But here is a comic I made with Toondoo.

First frame says: "Santa? You're a bit far from the North Pole.
Second frame says: "Elves. I had to get away from the elves. They have so many demands. I couldn't take it.
Third frame says: "I only asked for some socks."



1 comment:

  1. love the Scratch animation your students created. And great that you learned it along with the kids! Thanks for testing so many tools and sharing your thoughts on them.

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