Digital Storytelling - Fusing tradition with technology

When I was little, my mom and I would read at least one book every night. As I got older, the books turned into chapter books and those chapter books turned into trilogies, chronicles, and entire series. I have very found memories of sitting in my mother's room before bed reading The Chronicles of Narnia and how excited we would both get (because she loved reading the books just as much as I did) when Mary Pope Osborn would come out with a new Magic Tree House book. All of those books were good, old fashioned paper and ink and I still have them, although now they're packed away in boxes for my kids in the future.
That form of storytelling is out-dated for this new generation.
While students today still like the tradition of reading stories, they want more pizzazz. They want characters that move. They want to narrate the story themselves, hit a button, and replay it to their peers. Like everything else in their age, they want it DIGITAL.
Digital storytelling is the relatively new way of sharing literature using technologies such as computers, tablets, or phones. Using a variety of apps (and when I say variety, I mean it. Everyone who's anyone in the app world now has an app for digital storytelling), students can create their own books, videos, or narrated slide shows. 
I have begun testing some of these apps and here are some of my new favorites: 

1) Screen Chomp
Screen Chomp is an app that basically lets you write on a white board and record audio while you do so. It would be wonderful for a flipped classroom or as the destination of a QR code and is really simple to use. There are no in app purchases (that I've found so far) or constantly running adds, so I would say you could safely let your students use this without hovering. 

2) Sock Puppets
Sock Puppets is an app that lets you record your voice and play it back through different puppet personalities. Users are able to pick the background, puppets and number thereof, as well as add stickers and music. After the user records their voice, the app "scrubs" the voice to make it unique to each individual puppet. This app is AWESOME and would be such a fun way for students to present reports or new information to their peers. It is also easy to share the puppet shows created in this app through email and other outlets, which is something I truly value. Students could create their puppet shows anywhere, share them with their teacher, who could then preview them and play them for the entire class. This app is free, but for a few more dollars one can purchase "Sock Puppets Complete" in which users can create their own puppets from scratch. 

3) Pic Collage
Pic Collage is a fairly popular app for social media users in that the user can create hundreds of different kinds of collages. BUT, did you ever think of using it in the classroom??  How much fun would it be for a kindergartener to make a collage of their butterfly life cycle experiment using pictures they took from every stage of the development? They would then be able to share it (again, an app is no good to anyone if the work cannot be easily shared) with their teacher, parents and family, or other students to show off their nifty science experience. In Pic Collage, users can add pictures from the device's camera roll or from a web search as well as text, stickers and unique backgrounds. 

When I was in elementary school, book reports meant standing at the front of the class and reading off of a piece of paper. If you wanted a picture slideshow, you either downloaded pictures off of the Internet, saved them, and uploaded them into a Microsoft Office PowerPoint or you had to go through the tedious process of taking them on a digital camera (which were just SO techy back then), uploading them to your computer, and then uploading them into a PowerPoint. If you wanted anything even remotely close to the digital stickers or funky texts available now, you better hope you were a pro at Paint (which we all know none of us were). Apps like these and many more are available free to students and teachers, easy to use, and wonderful for the modern classroom. Students can easily show off their newly acquired knowledge as well as creative skills to anyone and everyone. This kind of sharing makes students proud of their learning, which in turn makes them eager to learn more and that should be the goal for every classroom of any age: learners who LOVE learning. 



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