STORYBIRD IS AN STORYWRITING WEBSITE

Story telling is one of the most ancient forms of human expression. In an increasingly complex and media-saturated world there are a vast range of digital tools that allow students to express through digital narratives. Digital storytelling emerged over the last few years as a powerful teaching and learning tool that engages both teachers and their students, (Robin, 2008). Teachers must invest more time/effort in getting both content producers and consumers to develop their storytelling and narrative skills.

Here is one of the storybird page

How it can be used effectively for teaching and learning?

Storybird is an extremely engaging collaborative storywriting website that embodies three ideas – creating, reading, and sharing. It is also a collaborative storytelling tool that allows students to focus more on the content of their writing rather than drawing pictures.

Students are provided with the pictures - free collections of art. They just have to add the words to write stories. Once the art is chosen, students are able to build their

story by dragging and dropping pictures and creating/writing a story to match the pictures chosen. Stories can enclose a variety of genders – poetry, mysteries, tales, among others.

For teachers it is very easy to use because Storybird requires minimal teacher preparation and allows them to easily create individual user accounts for students. With that, teachers can view all story books that students are making.

Storybird also has online safety for young students built into it. Storybird can be used collaboratively with, either with another student in class or school, or with students from different schools in the region or even from another country.

Let see how storybird is functioning....

Engaging in activities which students see as having a concrete and practical outcome, such as writing electronic books, allows the students to be creators of something unique, of which they have ownership. They become comfortable with the act of creation: turning nothing into something. It also facilitates the transition from teacher-centred, class-based learning to one in which the pupil begins to acquire individual responsibility.

Because the work is carried out and published online, new, previously inconceivable possibilities of peer- and self-assessment also emerge in which students start learning via interaction with others.The art pictures were so good that the students in the activities described above, were inspired to write and read the colleagues’ stories. The more they read the more they wanted to write in order to read more stories to the classmates. This was very important because students were able to understand concepts and ideas better. The sharing of their stories made them comment, negotiate and discuss, giving them the tools to live in society.

Storybird promoted imagination, literacy, and self-confidence.