Digital Storytelling at Its Finest

         In the twenty-first century, many educators seek exciting new ways in which students can use technology to publish their final pieces of writing. Sure, Google Docs is a great way to word process and have work saved to the cloud, but there is nothing all that interesting about the pieces created with it. Certainly it has its many advantages in the world of education and beyond, but often young students (and might I suggest even older students) like being able to add pictures to their writing to bring it to life.

          This week in Instructional Applications of the Internet (one of the graduate level courses that I am currently taking through Kent State University) we were asked to create a use case scenario. For this, we had to explore our mobile learning application ideas from the viewpoint of a person who might be using our apps and put it into the format of a story. The professor of the class encouraged us to use visuals to help tell our stories. I decided to use a digital storytelling website called: StoryJumper to accomplish this, and was pleased with the final product. 

          One of the students in my class last year actually introduced me to the StoryJumper website, and it is the best I have found for digital storytelling to date. Since it was near the end of the school year that my student suggested the site, students had a very limited time to explore it. This project is the first time I have been back to investigate the website further and to actually try it out myself. The greatest advantage of StoryJumper (though there are many) is that it is completely free to join. Once you have signed up, you can create a class for all of your students. The nice thing about this is that the students' work can be saved after each session. There are many digital storytelling websites in which there is no way for users to save what they were working on to return to at a later time. Another advantage is that teachers can set it up so that students are only able to work on their pieces at a certain time. This way, if the teacher wants to use the finished pieces for a grade, they can rest assured that the student did not log on to work at home with the help of an adult or sibling. 

         Once students have logged in, they can begin to create their books. Another huge advantage of StoryJumper over many other digital storytelling resources is that there is a wide variety of background scenes and props to choose from. And if users cannot find what they are looking for in the preloaded collection of visuals, they can upload anything they want from their personal picture gallery. In creating my use case scenario, I employed a combination of my own uploaded visuals as well as ones that I found on StoryJumper itself. 

       So at this point you might be wondering: how can such a great resource not come with a cost? The answer is that the company makes its money on teachers and parents buying hardback or paperback copies of the books. But the digital versions of the stories can be shared as links and even embedded onto websites for nothing. You can see my final product at: http://itecgradschool.weebly.com/use-case-scenario.html. If you are an educator and have not heard of this website before, I guarantee that the wheels in your head are spinning as you think of all the wonderful educational possibilities.  

Until next time...