Telling a story is a natural way of conveying a meaning.

Since we were young, we’ve been told stories.  Telling stories is naturally engaging and take the “formality” out of learning.  Story telling is a vehicle that often carries a more important message underneath.  A well told story has multiple layers and can be understood from so many levels.  As such, it becomes important as teachers that we hold on to ideas and find the appropriate “vehicle” or story method to deliver it to our students.

When I think about effective teaching, it is often about teaching my lesson without the students knowing they are learning.  The engagement comes through presentation style and connecting with the students.  Story telling becomes natural.

In the latest assignment, I have been tasked with designing a story for my students (Grade 2/3) as a form of engagement.  I took it as an opportunity to reinforce the story writing process that we have been practicing in the classroom.  As a result the students already have background knowledge on the terms (ie. such as “climbing story”, problem, character, setting) and are using this as a review.  The characters used in the story have also been a fundamental part of the writing lessons in class.  So which tools would be effective as an extension to the lessons taught in the writing class?  As a secondary objective, it would beneficial if the students could use the tool afterwards.

After perusing a variety of tools on Alan Levine’s Digital Story wiki: Cogdogroo, I found a variety of tools that interested me: Glogster, Bubblr, Ourstory and Zooburst.

Glogster – allows users to create digital posters with multimedia and images embedded onto a page.  While it is visually appealing and interactive and allows the users to mash up various media, the freedom of the tool appears to be geared more towards upper intermediate (Grade 5+) to high school.  I felt that a more linear story would allow for them to focus on the concepts more.  While my primary students are capable of using Glogster, we are cautious in the district about letting students explore the internet freely to find content. Glogster would be more appropriate for an older group.

Bubblr – Allows students to quickly create comics by using photos from flickr.  My students are familiar with using a curated Flickr photo set for specific assignments.  Bubblr doesn’t extend on too many other digital concepts that are too difficult for my students to find.  I found that reproducing characters for a story concept would be difficult using this tool.  The students would almost have to produce the pictures and use those as a digital template before placing their story overtop.   Something like Pixton may be more appropriate in this case.

Ourstory – Allows users to quickly add story content and media to their photos and in a visually appealing method.  This style is very common in our classroom wiki or a blog, however, is a bit more intuitive and attractive.  As a story tool, this would be great to highlight specific events in a journey but isn’t as effective for a linear story.

I finally did settle on Zooburst, it isn’t the perfect tool (as it comes with some flaws).  Zooburst allows students to import images as characters or backgrounds and have them interact using speech bubbles.  Visually this seemed the most appropriate for my students as it provides viewers with a pop up story book in a cartoon form.  It also didn’t hurt that so many of my colleagues had decided to create wonderful stories using this tool.  The interactivity isn’t just for the viewer, however, as the creator is greeted with “pops” and “slurps” while creating the story.

There were a few quirks that I found when it came to using Zooburst:

• sometimes flipping the characters got them stuck
• rotating the board in one scene, mean that all the other pages were impacted (different camera scenes could’ve been useful)
• speech bubbles were sometimes difficult to access and manipulate.