STORY TELLING WITH STORY BIRD

Hi there, 

In this entry, I am going to introduce a website called STORYBIRD, which is useful for story telling activity. Storybird is a website, which allows anyone to create their own amazing stories with beautiful pictures in seconds. It also acts a a educational platform for teachers and learners to experience the usefulness of story telling. 

How to use: 

1. Think a story to write
2. Select the illustrations that suit your story
3. Add your writing (story)
4. Finally, publish it.

Below is a slide presentation on How to Make your own Storybird.

Above are the images of the webpage

This tool is amazing because:

• It provides many types of illustration or art pictures which range from many different artists.
• It create a sense of ownership by motivating the users to write up their own creative story and publish them.
• Helps to expand the users creativity in story telling and at the same time improve their creative writing skills
• Saves times because users could create many stories in a short time and also publish them to get people to read them - this could create a social network between the reader and the writer (allows more sharing ideas in the aspect of writing style)

However,

• The users have to explore the whole website before they could make use of it - not that quick and easy to understand at the beginning. (only at the begining)
• If there is collaborative story writing in pairs or group, it really requires a good planning of the story board. (If two or more people working with a story in separate places, they could not see what the other person did  and this might be problematic and the ideas may get jumbled up. 

Storybird in classroom

After a complete lesson on creative writing, the teacher could use the Storybird to get the learners to write their respective stories. Before using this tool, the teacher must explain explicitly about this tool and how it works to the learners. Then, the teacher could opt for pair or group work for the story telling task. Then, let the learners to brainstorm their ideas for their story and make a draft of their story. From the draft, the learners divide their respective parts to write and begin to write in the Storybird. They could continue their writing as homework. Finally, the learners (either in pairs or groups) could share their respective story in the classroom. The teacher may provide some feedback that would guide learners to improve their writing skills in future. Furthermore, this tool could be used for a story telling competition using ICT or the teacher could use this tool to instill the art of story telling among students.  

This is an example story (The Toy Maker by Pasqueflower) made using Storybird. Hope you like it and don't forget to try it out!!!

MJ