Digital Storytelling

Of the five digital storytelling sites that I reviewed, I think I would start with yodio if I were a teacher in a high school.  The others all have possibilities, as well, but right up front I like the yodio site for a high school project because it uses the most-important-of-all-devices (to students), the cell phone, to record the narratives.  It is free and easy to use, and doesn't seem too cartoonish for high school students.


Domo Animate

This site can be a time-sink.  It was very, very easy to use, but the options are just limitless.  I spent a while just randomly making a cartoon with the gingerbread man and a cat and a bear.  I spent a long time on the site but there are more embellishments I could play with - like the FX features.  I lost the gingerbread man when I created an account, but then I made another "cartoon" with a ninja (only 8 seconds long).   I think this site would be fascinating for middle or high school and it would be a fun way to present information on a topic or present research for a project.  It might take time teaching some of the features but it would be very easy to use after that. 

http://domo.goanimate.com/movie/0KSqf2GRIkgE/1

In addition to these cartoons or videos, domo.goanimate also has a slideshow feature. 


















The link below ("Nick") is to a 30 second Animoto "video" I made using some very hastily uploaded pictures of Nicholas.  I would love to have played around with the free educator version and make longer videos, but I do not have a valid school email address right now and it wouldn't let me sign up.

Nick   http://animoto.com/play/6031ufYrvhcKSBLo6nGeYA


I hope one of those links will work.


Yodio - I had not heard of "yodios" before.  So, you upload a pictures....or a series of pictures...and then you call yodio on the phone and record yourself saying things.  This creates a video with your voice narrating.  I need to actually do one to see how the voice lines up with the pictures.  The main problem here is that I absolutely hate my voice. 



Storybird - I already had a storybird account from 2010.  Unfortunately, my account was inactive and I could find a way to reactivate it so I had to use the "contact us" feature to try to figure out what was wrong. They wrote back and said they activated my account again and I made this "storybook":

http://storybird.com/books/gnf5ve5c88/edit/

I think this site would be best suited for elementary school, because the results look like "picture books" or "easy books".

The 50-Word Stories site is a big example of flash fiction.  This could be used as examples of 50-Word stories if you wanted to make an assignment where students would write their own 50-word stories with exactly 50 words, no more and no less.