Got a Story to Tell?

Digital Storytelling as an Effective Instructional Tool for Teachers:

• to enhance current lessons within a larger unit
  
• to facilitate discussion
  
• to make abstract or conceptual content more understandable
  
• to engage students by including images, audio and video elements in instruction
  
• helps students retain new information as well as aids in the comprehension of difficult material

Digital Storytelling as an Effective Learning Tool for Students

• potent tool for students who are taught to create their own stories
  
• to research a topic and then choose a particular point of view
  
• to use the library and Internet to research rich, deep content while analyzing and synthesizing a wide range of content
  
• to enhanced communications skills by learning to organize their ideas, ask questions, express opinions, and construct narratives
  
• to create stories for an audience, and present their ideas and knowledge in an individual and meaningful way
  

Check out Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling by the University of Houston.

Check out Comics in the Classroom wiki with tons of resources for using Comics in the Classroom!

Toontastic: I love this comic creator and it's now FREE! And...MISD now have it available for download on all of our iPads! Just go to the app catalogue.

BookPress is the best book making app on iPad. It allows anyone to create a storybook, or textbook in minutes. If you can dream it up, this app can help you create it. The books you create can be in quality print or in e-Book format in a matter of minutes. You can even read your new creation in iBooks. The final copy looks just like a gorgeous book from bookstore! One cool feature is the EdCenter that allows you to save the book to the bCloud. This allows you to create a class bookshelf of all of the student-created books!

Create quick, short animations called Gamis. Tellagami allows students to create an avatar and custom background. The avatar speaks with the student’s voice or via text-to-speech to tell the student-created story. Students can detail information about historical characters, book characters or scenes from a book, teach a concept, recite a poem, speech, or reflect on their learning.

Screencast your story with ScreenChomp. Provide students the opportunity to create their own tutorials, short stories, explanations of historical events, details of experiments, or reflections of their learning. Very easy to use for the younger learners!

Videolicious is an app that allows students to shoot short video and make quick edits. This is great for the budding filmmaker or storyteller. Many applications for the classroom with this app...digital storytelling of historical events, reflection time for end of unit studies, science experiments, mathematical concepts.

StoryKit is a straightforward way to create a digital storybook. There are a lot of various uses for having students create their own content...maybe their own short textbook on a particular concept! Put them at the center of their learning! Allow them to become authors of their own work! Click here for a link to one teacher's blog post about this app.

Use A Novel Idea is a tool for plotting your story and recording bursts of inspiration. Use its simple interface to create your characters, locations, scenes, and novels and then link them together to create your story's plot. Use the Idea feature to quickly jot down your creative sparks and link them to your story elements. Arrange your scenes by dragging and dropping them into place. Add scene goals and objectives for each character

Make storytelling collaborative with Storylines from Edmodo. This app can be connected directly through Edmodo as well. The game is played with 3, 5, 7 or 9 players. The first player picks a word or phrase. The second illustrates it. The third writes the phrase that they think is being illustrated. If you're playing with more than 3 players, the players then alternate between writing the phrase they think is being illustrated and drawing a new illustration. At the end of the game you see the whole chain of text and drawings played out.