Collaborative Digital Storytelling with Storybird
Storybird is another graphic method for having kids share work, practice telling stories, or learning a modern language. French, Spanish, and German seem to be no problem for this really cool web-based piece of software. I would love to hear from others about Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese, and other non-Latin based languages. There are even creative possibilities for art classes and schools could contribute to the Art Collection at Storybird. There are also Wikis of Storybird collections so students could share with others in a more private fashion. Fiona Joyce has quite a collection here http://mfl-storybirds.wikispaces.com/
Much more random is FlickrPoet which seems to pull random pictures from Flickr to match words. Sometimes the match is dead on....other times, well.....see for yourself...All of these new tools help kids liven up their writing with images. And, because the images are already online, kids only have to focus on their writing, they don't have to spend hours finding the proper image or take pictures, etc. Yes, those activities also have a place, but for helping students focus on just words, these two software applications will fill the bill nicely.
Monday, January 4, 2010
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i am enjoying all 3 blogs. the professional and the personal. i will do my best to keep up with all of you. i had never thought about some of these creative ways of teaching and learning. although still for me .. there's nothing like hearing about a visit to a local market in a faraway land or a walk to the old section, or even just the smells of these new places. happy new year.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the links to these two apps, which will make a great addition to the EFL classroom!
ReplyDeleteThe frustrating truth is not many developers (including Israeli developers) take Hebrew/Arabic into account. It also seems that the amount of Hebrew speakers tagging Flickr content in Hebrew is relatively small.
Unfortunately Storybird doesn't accept input of Hebrew characters, I'm guessing the same would be true for Arabic, but haven't checked.
Flickrpoet on the other hand does support Hebrew. However, probably due to the small number of Hebrew "taggers", the final result is very scant.