Group items tagged

What it is: Inklewriter is a great digital tool that lets students (and teachers if you are so inclined) write and publish interactive stories. Inklewriter lets students create choose-your-own-adventure type stories, story lines can come with choices and then be linked back together. Inklewriter makes this process easier by keeping track of which story paths have been finished and which still need work. There is no set-up required, no programming language to learn and no diagrams. Inklewriter is free to use and easy to share with the world when it is published. When a story is finished, it can even be converted to Kindle format!

How to integrate Inklewriter into the classroom: Inklewriter is a great digital tool for creative writing. Students can explore multiple plot lines and what-if scenarios in their fictional writing. I also like the idea of using Inklewriter to ask kids to explore the "what-ifs" in history. What if we lost/won this war/battle? What if the other guy (or girl) had been elected president? What if the Berlin wall hadn't come down? These types of stories are fantastic opportunities for students to explore their curiosities and, in the process, learn more about the event they are exploring. After all, you have to know something about how an event actually went in order to write alternate endings. Inklewriter would be a fun way for students to come up with alternate endings to a novel they are reading. Our students wrote a variety of endings for The Giver. Each student wrote a different ending that picked up from the last chapter of the book. Inklewriter would have been a great tool to use for all of these endings to be available in one place. Students could copy/paste the last paragraph of the actual book and then offer their alternative endings as options. In science, students could use Inklewriter as a tool to record their hypothesis. Students can write out the objective and steps in their experiment and make a new "alternate ending" for their various hypothesis. In math, students could create story problems where they lead others down the path to discover the correct answer.

"Meograph helps easily create, watch, and share interactive stories. Our first product combines maps, timeline, links, and multimedia to tell stories in context of where and when. Authoring is structured into a few simple prompts on an intuitive interface. Viewers get a new form of media that they can watch in two minutes or explore for an hour. Sharing is easy: the two most viral types of media are videos and infographics ... Meograph is both."

Thanks, Kelly! is this a free tool?

Soo Meta is a new digital presentation tool from the same people that developed the YouTube remixing tool Dragon Tape. Soo Meta allows you to combine videos from YouTube, pictures from the web or from your desktop, text, and voice recordings to create a presentation. You can also pull content in from Pinterest and Twitter to use in your final product. The Soo Meta editor is fairly easy to use. Create a free account to get started then open your browser to SooMeta.com/create/ and title your first project. After titling your project add a background image from your computer or from the web. Next pull in a video from YouTube. The video can be yours or any other publicly shared video. You can trim the start and the end time of the video in the Soo Meta editor. To add text just click the text box in the editor and type. Finally, to narrate a frame (Soo Meta calls them chapters) in your project click the microphone icon in the editor and make your recording. Completed Soo Meta projects can be embedded into your blog or website.

written by Kevin Hodgson is a must-read for anyone interested in the use digital storytelling and games in their language arts lessons. Kevin also regularly posts book reviews. Take a look at his recent post about using Stykz for creating stopmotion movies.

With Tellagami, begin by creating and customizing a character. Although there is not a great deal of variety in virtual appearance, just enough options exist to personalize your character. From there, you choose a background either from a few in the app itself or your camera roll. I love to take a picture at the front of the classroom and have my character introduce me to the class. I have worked with teachers where they introduce the classroom to students or parents with their character in different spots around the room, even on a bookshelf. After you customize your character and background, you can choose how you want your character to talk, either by recording your voice or typing in text. If you record your voice, you have 30 seconds. If you choose text to speech, there are male and female voices with a few different accents. Some quick ideas you might try: * Have your character tell a story. * Pick a person in history and have them introduce themselves * Use a plant cell as the background and have the avatar name and discuss the function of each part of the cell. * Recite a famous poem or speech * Read a poem they wrote * Take a trip or go back in time and describe where the location/time period * Speak in Spanish, French, Mandarin or any language When you are all done, Gamis can be emailed, posted to Facebook, or Tweeted, which also generates a link to share. You can also view your movie online and get the embed code. I could see embedding a whole bunch of these on a class wiki or blog. You can also save them to your iPad Photos, which is what I like to do. From there, Gamis can be combined together in iMovie or incorporated into other apps like Explain Everything. (Greg Kulowic has some great examples of this, as "appsmashes.") Your only limit is your imagination! Using animation with your students can have a profound effect on how they participate in a project. Their work can be liberated when they have the opportunity to separate

Starts with the simple question: What do you want to create today? Take a look… there are MANY examples from the classroom. See what inspires you? See how you can upgrade a traditionally taught lesson or project? It is not just about the fun and tech "wow" such upgrades can bring, but about the valuable and necessary skills we are exposing our students to (at their developmentally appropriate stage). Skills they will need for THEIR future. Remember what Heidi Hayes Jacobs always says: "What year are YOU preparing your students for?"

an iPad app for quickly creating simple narrated photostories. To create a story using Pixntell all that you need to do is start a new project, select some images, place them in order, and then start talking about each of your pictures. You control the timing for each image. If you want to talk about your first picture for twenty seconds, your second picture for just three seconds, and your third picture for fifteen seconds, you can do that. When your project is complete you can upload it directly to YouTube, share it on Facebook, or send to friends via email.

service offering free online booklet creation and publishing. To create a book using Simple Booklet just sign-up for a free account and click create. Select the layout template that suits your needs. To add content click anywhere on the blank canvas and a menu of options will appear. You can add text, images, audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet. In the field for adding text there is an option to copy from Word documents. Each page of your Simple Booklet can have multiple elements on it. To include videos you can upload your own files or select from a variety of provides including SchoolTube, TeacherTube, YouTube, and others. To add audio to your pages you can upload your own files or again select from the online hosts Last.fm, Sound Cloud, or Mix Cloud. When you're done building pages in your Simple Booklet you can share it online by embedding it into a webpage or you can share the unique link generated for your booklet.

Put yourself on the map: Easily make shareable, animated trips with photos, music, links and stories. At its most basic level, Tripline is a way for you to tell a story by putting places on a map. That's a very human activity that has been happening for thousands of years. It's also a way for you to easily answer those questions we hear so often: Where are you guys going? When are you leaving? How was the trip? What did you do? - the kind of questions that photos don't answer. And just like in the movies, the Tripline player gives you an animated line moving across the map with a soundtrack. That's appropriate, because our journeys are our own epic tales of discovery and adventure.

Popcorn Maker is an online video mashup tool that makes it easy to integrate several different forms of online media into a video. A clip from YouTube can be enhanced with article clips, images, text, audio, maps, other live feeds and social media content. Add some "bling" to any video clip…interactive is better! Videos can be mashed without logging in. Creating a user profile let's you save and share the finished project.