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The Zimmer Twins is a neat site for introducing elementary school students to making simple animated video stories. On the Zimmer Twins site students can create a story from scratch or complete one of the "cliff hanger" story starters. Students do not need to have any drawing skills in order to create a story as all elements are added to the video through a simple drag and drop interface. Students select settings, characters, character actions, emotions, and text styles then drag those elements into the storyboard. Students then arrange those elements and type words into the conversation bubbles where appropriate

The Digital Storytelling Teacher Guide is a free twenty-eight page ebook produced by Microsoft. The guide outlines the basics of digital storytelling, offers ideas for digital storytelling projects for all grade levels, and provides examples of digital storytelling projects. Microsoft's Digital Storytelling Teacher Guide also offers instruction for using Windows Movie Maker and Photo Story in the classroom.

"public on the web. The opportunity for students to generate more writing and create more authentic representations of their learning than ever before. The opportunity for students to choose how they present their learning. Leveling the playing field for access for all our students. The opportunity to remove the ceiling on what they can learn and share.  We purposely did not set a finite goal on what outcome we want to see as "results" of 1:1 because what we truly want is for each student to be able to follow their passion in learning and allow that to take them to new possibilities. Equally important as considering the why, is considering the why not.  I recently wrote a brief blog post on considering the opportunity cost of not choosing 1:1.  I strongly believe if 1:1 is honestly considered, the only roadblock for districts considering 1:1 is the fear of managing the logistics.  Our next blog post in this series will cover how we have addressed the many logistical concerns of a 1:1 initiative.  One of the most important decisions that made our logistical concerns much easier to address was our device selection, the Chromebook. So the question we have answered the most since last December when we publicly made our decision is  "why the Chromebook?"  Often the question is phrased something like this, "so why didn't you choose iPads,  and aren't Chromebooks just the web?"  As I wrote here in my blog, yes they are a web-based  and web-managed device, and that is actually an incredible advantage over many other potential devices.  Ryan Bretag wrote a great blog post on this topic, "The Internet as a Belief System".  Again, many more technical specifics will be discussed in our next post, but when we considered a device we looked for something that could ensure our resources, both time and money, were focused more on student learning rather than supporting the technology.  I am so excited to report that we launched 3,500 devices in our

"PrimaryAccess is a suite of free online tools that allows students and teachers to use primary source documents to complete meaningful and compelling learning activities with digital movies, storyboards, rebus stories and other online tools."

#chromebooks