Digital+Storytelling

What is digital storytelling?
"Digital Storytelling" is an emerging term, one that arises from a grassroots movement that uses new digital tools to help ordinary people tell their own 'true stories' in a compelling and emotionally engaging form. These stories usually take the form of a relatively short story (less than 8 minutes) and can involve interactivity. The term can also be a broader journalistic reference to the variety of emergent new forms of digital narratives (web-based stories, interactive stories, hypertexts, and narrative computer games). ([|Wikipedia])

AASL Smackdown Digital Storytelling Links [|What Kids Learn When they Create with Digital Media] (MacArthur Foundation Webcast) [|More tools for Digital Storytelling] [|Digital Storytelling Tools for Educators] by Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano (ebook)

[|PhotoStory]
Microsoft’s Photo Story is a very user friendly program that is available for free from the Microsoft web site (@http://www.microsoft.com/photostory). This program does not use a video camera or digital video recordings. Instead Photo Story creates the video from digital image stills, such as digital photographs. The program can also add narration, which will require a microphone connected to your computer. The Photo Story will turn your still pictures and sounds into a video at the end. The program will create video files which can be played using the Windows Media Player or any other video player with the capabilities of playing .wmv files (see Figure 1). [|How to Create Your Photostory]

[|VoiceThread]  VoiceThread – Voice Thread is a site that transforms media into collaborative spaces with video, voice, and text commenting. This is a nice and easy way to create multimedia work spaces for teachers and students to share. Students can start by adding pictures, videos, sounds, or documents, and then adding voice annotations. Others arethen invited to annotate on the same page using a webcam, telephone, microphone, or simply writing in a response, and users can see and hear all the comments that arerecorded about the picture, video, document, etc. The Voice Thread can then be embedded in a student or classroom website or blog. Simple to make, this really is a great way for students to share their their input.

 Ed.VoiceThread (http://ed.voicethread.com) 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 on Ed.VoiceThread are, students have individual accounts that are easily viewable to educators, students can create, edit, and manage their own portfolio, students cannot add contacts or send invitations to any users outside of the Ed.Voice Thread community, and they cannot view any content that is not created by an Ed.Voice Thread member. Teachers can quickly view and access all students’ Voice Threads. Voice Threads can be made private or public depending on the assignment and requirements. Ed.VoiceThread comes in two packages one free and the other, called Class Subscription, for $60/year. Free users can only create 3 VoiceThreads, have 75 MB of storage, no uploading of MP3 comments, 30 min of webcam commenting,  advertising will be present, single file size limit of 25 MB, and no downloads of the media. In the Pro version, students can create an unlimited number of Voice Threads, get 10GB of  storage, can upload MP3 comments, have unlimited webcam commenting, 30 archival movie exports, no advertising, single file size limit of 100MB and allows downloads of media. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;"> Ed.VoiceThread is the ideal place for students and teachers to collaborate and interact with digital media. The added functionality for schools with Ed.VoiceThread is very useful. Students can use Ed.VoiceThread to create digital stories, documentaries, practice and document language skills, explore geography and culture, solve math problems, and much more.


 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">VoiceThread for Education Wiki
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">[|100 Ways to Use VoiceThread in EDU]
 * <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">[|VoiceThread Digital Library]

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;"> <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">[|Flipbook] is a web tool that allows teachers and students to create a digitally animated flipbook and then share it with the world. It is easy to create and is lots of <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;"> fun to work with. Besides the obvious art implication, Flipbooks might be a great creative way for students (or teachers) to animate a historical event, show the visual representation of how to do a math equation, show a scientific process, or even retell a scene from a book.

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;"> (http://storybird.com) Story bird is a fun 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 share in an online library with the world. Storybird “promotes imagination, literacy, and self-confidence.” Creating, sharing, and reading a Storybird is free. The imaginative artwork will have your students imaginations soaring and lead to enthusiastic writing. <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;"> Students can work together in teams to create stories. Students will feed off of each others ideas, creating more creative stories and learning together. Storybird is also a fantastic place to create a <span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;"> classroom story, each student can contribute pages to the story. The final product can be easily share with family and friends in the online library. Storybird can be used by teachers to make “special” stories for students. They can include students as characters, emphasize classroom themes or curriculum, and be created for specific reading levels. Encourage your students to create and share their stories on Storybird, open up your classroom computer during DEAR time for students to read the stories their classmates have created. Storybird has free class accounts that allow students to use Storybird without providing an email address.

<span style="font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;"> (Source: [|Super Book of Web 2.0 Tools for Educators)]