Students Create Weekly Newsletters Using Digital Storytelling App

I came across this example of how one class uses the Shadow Puppet app to create weekly newsletters about what is going on in the classroom. Thought it was interesting to see how digital tools were used to communicate with parents and how students took ownership of the process.



The Shadow Puppet was created by Mrs. Weber's 2nd grade class.

Thanks to Mrs. Weber's 2nd graders for sharing this. Hope others consider the possibilities of using digital storytelling and apps like Shadow Puppet in this way. Big fan of Shadow Puppet, and recommend educators sign up for the educator's account.

Looking for Digital Storytelling Tips

Shelley Sanchez Terrell left this excellent slide deck on SlideShare with many tips and resources. Just wanted to share it especially given my enthusiasm for spreading resources to encourage others to implement digital storytelling. Hope you take a look!

Digital Storytelling Tips, Apps, & Resources from Shelly Sanchez Terrell

Why I Love VoiceThread

I was asked by a representative from VoiceThread to do a guest blog for its site. I ended up writing a post called "Why I Love VoiceThread," and inserted some examples of Voice Threads. The blog post can be found by following this link to the VoiceThread site. If some of the VoiceThreads in this post don't load on your mobile, use the link below to access the original post.

VoiceThread post by Judy Arzt

Here I share the original post I submitted:

Why I Love VoiceThread

I use this tool in my own teaching, but, more importantly, encourage the teachers in my classes to use it with their students. The app is flexible and works on a variety of devices. For instance, teachers with limited access to technology in their classrooms can download the app to their phone. This suits those who teach the lower grades, starting with pre-k. The young children find phones easy to use and enjoy recording their voice and hearing it back.  Often, they use hand-drawn illustrations from a unit of study, and the teacher uploads these, and the children record a contribution. This format allows for creating collaborative class books, as illustrated in these two examples.

• Alliteration, literature project by elementary students

• Animals, science project by 1st graders

VoiceThread offered a perfect match for the Alliteration project; hearing the alliteration reinforced that successive words had the same initial sound. The Animals project reviewed science concepts while introducing the genre of non-fiction. Each student voice recorded facts to accompany an hand-drawn illustration of a chosen animal. Students watched the final presentation and voice recorded replies to peers.

A kindergarten teacher, with no access to technology in the classroom, used her phone for young students to create an amusing book, with each child adding a picture and voice comment to develop the story’s plot, characters, and setting.

• Mary Had a Toaster

The students enjoyed the experience so much, they created a sequel.

For young children, VoiceThread presents a way to understand content concepts in chunks. One teacher using the phone app created this lesson for her young students.

• Fruit Kabob Patterns, math for pre-k students

For students in the upper elementary grades, access to tablets, laptops, or desktops facilitates the process, as illustrated in these examples.

• Students Share Their Favorite Books, a collaborative class project created by 6th graders

• A Poetry Presentation, a collaborative class project created by 5th graders

The Favorite Book project was one the teacher did annually at the end of the year, with each student writing a book review, with all collected in one print book to be used the following year. This approach limited how many of the new students were able to read the book simultaneously. VoiceThread put a new spin on the project. Now any student could access all the reviews in one place any time and hear the reviews.

For the poetry project, the teacher in the past had each child recite a poem at a Parent Open House. This often caused students to get nervous, and students with special needs were excluded. With VoiceThread, students uploaded the poem they wrote with an illustration and recited the poem. In this way, students had opportunities to re-record their readings, and those students who struggled in a front of a group or who had special needs succeeded. For the latter, the teacher sat with a child and mouthed the words to help the child along with the recording. The use of VoiceThread leveled the playing field and made for a smooth event for the Open House. Parents enjoyed seeing their child’s poem on the “big screen” while hearing the voice recordings. For parents who could not attend, the VoiceThread was a win!

For older students, starting in middle school, when many have mobile devices, the process extends beyond the school day. The teacher posts the VoiceThread, and students add comments via their devices, with replies occurring at the student’s convenience. One of the foreign language teachers from my course uses VoiceThread in this way. The app affords students an excellent way to practice newly acquired skills via the speech, video, and text comment options.

In teaching, I often introduce VoiceThread through a collaborative activity. Recently, in the course, “Integrating Technology and Literacy,” which enrolls pre-k through 6th-grade teachers, we created a VoiceThread of our favorite children’s books. Before class, each person sent me a picture of the book’s cover, and I uploaded each into the app.

Books We Love, Our Favorite Children’s Books

During class, each person voice-recorded the reason for the selection and how the book is used with students. This quick demonstration electrified the teachers, who implemented the app with their students, and, in turn, shared out with us their students’ productions, adding to our list of possibilities.

The features of VoiceThread invite a plethora of ways for teachers to re-envision their curriculum. Once introduced to VoiceThread, teachers are stoked to use it with students. The app complements multiple intelligences theory and differentiates instruction, popular trends in education today.  

So, just wondering what others think of VoiceThread as a collaborative digital composing and sharing opportunity.

Another Easy-to-Use Digital Story App

Take some time over your summer break to explore and have fun creating entertaining videos with Wideo.


Here's a clever one I caught created by a librarian.

Here is another example I found that was featured on the Wideo site. It addresses digital citizenship. Perhaps you can use it as a starting point for discussion with your students.

The following one was created by a graduate student at the University of Saint Joseph, CT, for a course focused on digital citizenship. She created the video to show students how quickly information circulates on social media as a lesson in digital citizenship.

The site offers some images to use, but I also found it worthwhile to upload my own photos, done easily with the Upload feature. Transitions and music can be added to finalize the video, and the final cut can be uploaded to YouTube for easily inserting the video into a blog post.

One point I would make about using Wideo is that those who create videos should be sure to include a slide with their name and other related information, so others viewing the videos will know who the creator is.  Notice in these three cases, the videos did not include this information at the Wideo site, so when the video was uploaded to YouTube to insert in a blog post, there was no way to trace back to see who created the video via the Wideo site.

On his blog, Free Technology for Teachers, Richard Byrnes has a post about the site: "Create Animated Wideo." You might want to check out the post. 

As for embedding a Wideo into a Blogger post, I found it easier to send the video to YouTube and insert the video into a post that way than to use the embed code offered at the Wideo site.

So, Wideo is another digital storytelling tool to add your toolbox. Overall, the power of digital storytelling as a learning tool cannot be underestimated. My suggestion is to become comfortable with several tools, some that work off websites, and some that work as apps on iPad or Android tablets; plus, expect to find more of these apps working right from smartphones. As we see more devices in all formats--desktops, laptops, tablets, and Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD)--as educators, we should be prepared to lead our students in discovering specific digital story tools. Digital storytelling is an excellent way to meet curricular goals as well as standards set for students as 21st century learners and digital citizens and digital learners. Numerous literacy skills are encompassed: brainstorming, organizing, scripting, visual literacy, oral literacy, communication with an audience, research and reading, and learning from digital stories that peers create on content within the curriculum. Most of all, when students create digital stories to share with others, the process empowers the students as leaders, instructors, and teachers. Plus, the students find the process engaging, hands-on, and intuitive, a way to be creative while also honing their technical skills.

Here is how the videos look if they're embedded using the site's embed code. Note the width of the video can be changed to accommodate the dimensions of a blog, website, or other digital space.

Always in Search of Digital Story Tools

Although it is fun and challenging to use movie-making software like iMovie, I also like experimenting with apps. Ones that I especially like for young children are Shadow Puppet and Toontastic.

Recently, I experimented with AdobeVoice, a free app. Stories are created by uploading your own photos or by selecting from the wide variety of Creative Commons photos accessible directly in the app. Animated characters and images are also available. Once the visuals are inserted and arranged, the next step is to voice record your narration. The app contains music selections for a background effect.

Here's my first attempt with using Adobe Voice, selecting photos I found by searching the app's library using the search terms "Alaska" and "Denali National Park."

To view the story, click on the image:

The program is easy to navigate and would work well for young children on the iPad. They would probably like the animated choices in the app for their images, but photos taken in and around the classroom, school, and community, or from a field trip would also work well. 

What are your favorite programs for digital storytelling? I think I will continue to play around with AdobeVoice, maybe next time uploading my own photos. Though I find the animated images in the program limited, I still think young children would enjoy that option. Best of all, I like the access to the tremendous library of Creative Commons photographs and how easy it is to search for them by using key terms.

To add to this post, no sooner did I post it, within a day, I found an example of how 6th grade teacher Kevin Hodgson used Adobe Voice to recap students' end-of-the-year survey responses. I invite you to take a look, but come back here to post your thoughts on the ways in which this tool and similar ones can be used for varied educational purposes. Click on the image below to see Kevin's end-of-the-year wrap-up. Plus, it helps to learn what 6th graders liked and did not like regarding what was implemented in their classroom, and Kevin offers an honest recap.

Moving Along with Our Favorite Children's Books

So we started a VoiceThread in class tonight. This was the first time we used the program.

Here is what we have so far, and we will add more comments next week.

VoiceThread.




We then experimented using two apps on the iPad to make quick videos. Our goal was to compare the three tools for creating a photo story about children's books.

We won't edit the versions completed on the iPad. That was not the intent. We just wanted to compare different tools to deliver comparable content.

On the iPad, we first used the free version of Shadow Puppet, which allowed us to upload 10 images. We then audio recorded our comments about each of the books. Next, the final version was transferred to the iPad's camera roll, so it could be accessed there to upload to YouTube.

We next experimented with iMovie on the iPad. We did not have the limitation of 10 images, but we also kept each of the clips to 15 seconds to keep the final video short. We used one of the music tracks in iMovie, but did not use other features, except to audio record ourselves for our allotted 15 seconds. The final version was uploaded to YouTube.


Here are the two versions.

Shadow Puppet Version

iMovie on iPad Version

So what do you think so far? Would you consider doing a collaborative photo story like this one with students?

We also used Padlet to create a bulletin board of our favorite children's books. It was easy for us to collaborate online using the tool. Here is what we have so far, shown in a screen shot.

My New Favorite Digital Story App: Shadow Puppet

Why didn't I know about this free app sooner. This morning, I downloaded it to my iPad, went through the screen shots of how to use the app, and within a minute, I was up and running.

For my first attempt, just grabbed from my iPad camera roll some photos I had left over from a conference on campus at the University of Saint Joseph. Some were blurry, but as I was just experimenting and wanted to find out how seamless using the app was, I just used what I could find quickly that related to a single event.

So, uploaded a few of the pics right into the app. Then just audio recorded whatever came to mind for each photo, and saved the final product. Wanted to see what the share options were from there. For simplicity sake, selected share to email, and sent the video to my own email and to a colleague who helped plan the event captured in the video. She emailed back to say, "Love It."

Mind, you this was a first attempt, and when I opened the video from email, I could see it could use lots of improvement, but also wanted to find out from there if I could upload to a site like YouTube or Vimeo. The options were several. First, I selected from the emailed video to download, which I did on my Mac, and then I selected the option to share the video on YouTube. Worked like a breeze.

Feeling confident, decided to try my hand on a second video. Went back to the iPad, and made another one, this time also including a quick video I had in the camera roll. Found out the free version of Shadow Puppet allows for uploading 10 photos or videos, but was content with that. Went through the same process as outlined above, audio recording a quick narrative, sending the saved video to my email, accessing it from there, downloading it my Mac and then sending it out to YouTube.

Here are the two videos, but mind you, these were done quickly. As soon as I free up more space on my iPad to store more photos and videos, I plan to play with Shadow Puppet further.

First Attempt:

Second Attempt: Tried to find clearer pics on camera roll and selected one of the videos in the camera roll.

Do you have a favorite app for making quick videos? How do you envision using an app like Shadow  Puppet in the classroom?

Update: I tweeted out how much I enjoyed the ease of using Shadow Puppet and got a reply from the company, pointing to a page on its site with some samples. I am including a link to find the example of how the app was used by one teacher for students to tell about their art projects. Take a look and listen to what the students had to say: "Stories, Reflecting on Art Projects." While on the site, also notice the other examples, lesson plan ideas, and information about using the app to meet Common Core Standards.

So who could ask for anymore? Sure you need an iPad or iPhone, but grab one from a neighbor if you don't have one, and try out Shadow Puppet.

If you explored around the Shadow Puppet site, let us know what you found of interest.

More on Digital Storytelling

Check out these slides from Lynn Hilt. They outline the value, process, and some tools for digital storytelling. They also point to the value of implementing digital storytelling in the elementary school classroom, but the principles are universal. We all love to tell a story. Digital storytelling just makes it easier and more seamless to share those stories using contemporary tools.

Digital Storytelling from Lyn Hilt

Look What These Kindergarteners Did with iPads

You all know the story If You Give a Cookie to a Mouse. Well, take a look at this Little Bird Tale to see what happens when you give kindergarteners an iPad. Click on the image to view the kindergarteners' story of what they accomplished with their iPads. Their story, "If You Give Kindergarteners an iPad," is both amusing and enlightening, and also reminds us of how given the technology tools and a teacher willing to integrate the tools well, what young children can accomplish. We can stretch their literacy skills as far as possible when we put the tools in their hands and plan our lesson well. This Little Bird Tale illustrates not only effective use of iPads, but also the value of using a tool such as Little Bird Tales for students to create their own books.

• Click to view my tale.
• 

Learning to Use VoiceThread in EDUC584

This is a practice VoiceThread we created in EDUC584, spring 2012. That semester, we Skyped with authors and a few teachers. We photographed and video recorded the sessions. We used pictures from our Skype sessions to create this practice VoiceThread. This one was used just to demonstrate how the site works and is not intended as a finished product. The VoiceThread is being embedded, but following it are hyperlinks to VoiceThreads that teachers taking EDUC584 created for use in the classroom or with their students.




This link goes to a VoiceThread a teacher created in which her students do the voice recordings.

Ms. Field's First Grade Animal VoiceThread

This one was created by a teacher to tell students about herself at the beginning of the school year.

Jamee Introduces Herself to Her Students

Maribeth's VoiceThread with Her Students' Drawings (Pre-School)

How might you consider using VoiceThread in your own teaching? The site has some samples for review, so you can also check those for ideas. Here is a link to some that I saved for reference.

The site also showcases VoiceThreads on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis.

Here's a link to those showcased this past month.
Here's a link to ones showcased during a week.
Last, these VoiceThreads were showcased on a specific day.

Overall, what is your impression of this tool, which can be used on computers, tablets, and even phones? What ideas do you have for using VoiceThread with students?

Learning to Use Storybird in EDUC 584

Storybird is an easy tool to use once you start playing around with it. As with other tools, the first time around will be trial and error, but once you get the knack of it, it will be easier to use the next time around. First, get the knack of it before you use it with students.

Once you open your account, go to setting, and note how you can set the age bracket to filter the kinds of illustrations that students will be able to use. This is an important feature to use when implementing the program in the school setting. I created the below using an age setting for elementary students.

Here is a quick example. Note when using Storybird, once a theme and illustration set are chosen, you begin by creating your cover for the book. You  use the + sign in the program to advance to the next page, but each time, you need to hit the Save button to save a page before advancing to your next page. You simply drag and drop the illustration you want on the page, and then use the space for writing text to compose your story line for that page. Once done with the page, remember to hit Save and then hit the + sign to advance to the next page. When your story is completed, go to the Menu to save it, and you will be prompted with specific options. Once your story is successfully processed, you can go back in and get the embed code to copy so you can embed your story in a blog post. You can also grab the URL for the story if you prefer to use that to direct viewers to your story on the Storybird site.

To view this story, use the full-screen option, which is in the lower right-hand corner.



Here are some links to find examples created by former EDUC 584 students. They created these stories to read to their students. In other cases, students worked with the teachers to create the stories, doing this as a collaborative project, with students selecting the illustrations and dictating or typing the text for each page in the story.

Anna created several posts about her use of Storybird with her kindergarteners:

• My Little Darlings Make Me Smile (student examples)
• Done and Presented (her example, final draft)
• Created to Teach (her example, first draft)

Mari Beth created this one to use with her preschoolers

• Bingo, I Think I Got It

Bryan created this one to use with his second graders.

• Digital Story

Now that you've seen some examples, how do you envision using a tool like Storybird with students? 

Students of All Ages Can Create Public Service Announcements (PSA's)

Here is a PSA that students made regarding stopping bullying. It is a realistic example of what students can do when teachers offer them the opportunity to make PSA's. If you don't want to show your students' faces in a video, there are all kinds of ways for them to make PSA's. Although this example shows the students' faces, it is just one example of a PSA. Click on the image below to access the video from Animoto. Below the image of the video are links to posts that Bill Ferriter wrote about the project and the lesson plan he used for the student activity.

Blog Post about the Anti-Bullying PSA
Lesson Plan

Would you consider having your students make PSA's? If so, what topics might they address? What tool would you consider for them to make the PSA, keeping in mind the tool does not have to be technology one?

Create Animated Videos with GoAnimate

Here is a short video I made with GoAnimate. I am using the free version. I used only the settings, characters, speech bubbles, and music options to make this one, but lots of options are available in the free version. View in full screen to see the speech bubbles more easily.


So What's You Doing? by Judy A on GoAnimate

Ideas for Using Animoto to Enrich Student Learning

The Read/Write/Think website, which offers lots of lesson plan ideas, recently ran a post, "Bringing Animoto to Life in the Classroom." The post included many good ideas for using Animoto successfully in the classroom, as well as strategies for introducing the tool to students.

cc licensed ( BY NC SA ) flickr photo shared by dennisar

The post also reminds us about opening an educator's account and then enrolling your students by using the code Animoto provides. Setting up an Animoto Educator's account following the directions provided also helps to keep a class organized as students work with the tool and want to showcase their work. One suggestion was to set up a wiki with links to the students' Animoto. I did something like one semester to keep track of students' Animotos and to make it easier for other educators to find the Animotos all in one place.

Animotos for Spring 2012 students on a wiki page.

Some of the ideas that teacher Kathy Wickline suggested on Read/Write/Think website for using Animoto include:

• Students introducing themselves. One of the Education 584 teachers in the West Hartford Cohort did this with his 6th graders. Take a look at his blog post where he includes three samples from his students, "Pulling It All Together."
• Use of Animoto for students to recap a research project. This option can be offered as an alterative to the classic PowerPoint.
• Set up an Scavenger Hunt in which students go off and take photos to document their findings. My niece did this with campers she supervised when she was a counselor this summer. The campers loved it, and then we assembled their photos in an Animoto. It was nice to share this with parents. In a school setting, the Animoto could be posted on a class website and shared with parents.
• Create scrapbooks to review the school year. The Read/Write/Think does not include creating a Scrapbook specifically of a field trip, but one of the former Education spring 2012 students did just that. She created a scrapbook using photos of biweekly field trips her students made to a local farm, "Farm Trip Animoto."  Another teacher from the Spring 2012 also used Animoto for a field trip summary, "Field Trip Animoto." 

Given the valuable ideas the Read/Write/Think site offers, including organizing setting up a class Animoto site, I suggest going right to the post as well as following some of the links in the post. "Bringing Lessons to Life with Animoto."

Once you go the post on Read/Write/Think, notice the teacher, Kathy Wickline, who created the post, also has other contributions.

Screen Capture done with Awesome Screen Capture

If you click on her Profile link, you will find other lesson ideas she contributed to the Read/Write/Think site. She has lots of good ideas for using other Web 2.0 and other tools such as:

• Voki as a way to create commercials
• Prezi in relation to historical fiction
• Glogs for book reports
• Book Trailers created with PhotoStory 3 including a template for students to organize the trailer

Let us know what ideas you gather about using Animoto? If you are not yet following the Read/Write/Think site, you might consider doing so.  Take a look at the site's homepage to get an idea of the wealth of resources offered. Read/Write/Think.

The Art of Storytelling

I just found this great site sponsored by the Delaware Art Museum that connects storytelling with art. There are a variety of ways to use the site, so check it out for yourself and explore around. Tell us what you find that looks of interest. Don't want to spoil it by telling you too much in advance. I have screen captured the page with a link to the site, acknowledging the image source that way. Click on the picture to visit the site.

Must-See Video Created by 5th Graders: "I Am Art"

In this video, the students act out what art means to them. The video shows their creativity, reflects art's diversity, and is just plain downright entertaining. These students are awesome. Take a look, and let us know your reaction.



I AM ART from Tricia Fuglestad on Vimeo.

Anyone Can Create Digital Stories

This short video presents a good overview of the digital story process. I like the index method for creating a storyboard or collecting ideas, but eventually I prefer to see my narration typed because reading from handwritten notes, whether I am reading them or someone else, is not as crisp as typed ones. However, if you're making digital stories with a group of students, notecards or typed notes cut out in strips for each student might work well to move the script along.

 

 For those using PhotoStory 3, here is a 7-minute video that incorporates the features you will need to use, including the reminder to also save your work as Project, so you can go back and edit it. Remember, if you need to download PhotoStory 3, only do so from the official Microsoft site. Other sites offering the download may be bogus and result in also downloading a virus. This is true for downloading in general, so exercise caution every time you try to download from any site.

 

Questions about the digital story project can be posted to our EDUC 584 Google Community which will expedite others seeing it in the event that they too have the same concern or have the answer to one of your questions.

Too Many Options, Too Many Choices

Every day it seems I come across another way to expand teachers' professional development. We no longer need to rely on our school systems or attending conferences to keep up to date. Much is available to us at our fingertips.

For instance, I use a variety of tools to curate resources that I find online. These include Pinterest, Diigo, Scoop.It, Live Binders, and Pocket, as well as the iPad apps Flipbook and Zite.

Recently, I signed up for another resource, which looks promising not so much as a curating tool, which it is, but as a visually appealing way to share resources on a particular topic. The tool is Edcanvas, which is an appropriate name for what this tool does.

Given the emphasis on pushing for the integration of digital storytelling in the curriculum, I thought    I would share an example I found from a colleague who has been using EdCanvas. This specific Edcanvas focuses on digital storytelling. Edcanvas: Digital Storytelling, by Kimberly Powell. 

Once you sign up for an account, you can save canvases others have created to your own account for future reference. In that regard, this site reminds me of LiveBinders, another resource to check out if you have not already.

Edcanvas is fairly new, but I like the various options it offers for sharing. In addition to sharing a canvas by providing a direct link to it, canvases can be sent to and shared through accounts like YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, and Twitter. Here is a screen capture of Kimberly's Digital Storytelling Canvas. Note where I have marked with arrows the options to Play, Copy, and Share (+, which when clicked opens a list of places to share a canvas.)

When you hit the Play Canvas (see arrow in upper left corner), the resources that have been archived on that canvas will play as slide show. Additionally, from the main page of a canvas, you can click on the chain icon to go directly to an archived resource, and then if that resource is of interest to you, click on its image to go directly to the resource on the Internet. 

In some ways, Edcanvas reminds me of Pinterest, but Edcanvas seems easier to use for sharing resources on a specific topic or area of interest. Overall, I like the slide view and the ease of sharing canvases with others as well as copying a canvas to your own Edcanvas account.

The site features on its Gallery page canvases others have created by subject areas. Here is a partial screen capture to show how featured canvases are organized by subject area.

Edcanvas is intended for educational use as its name implies. When you have a few moments, look into Edcanvas: Digital Storytelling, by Kimberly Powell. This example will offer a glimpse of how Edcanvas works for curating and sharing and how to navigate around a canvas. 

Happy exploring, and if you do explore, please leave a comment to let us know your impressions.

Students Writing Digital Stories with PhotoStory 3

View these two digital stories created by groups of five students in elementary class in a unit on famous Black American. Lucia posted her students' digital stories on her blog. These digital stories speak to the power of students to create digital stories that require writing the script, reading their lines, and timing their script to match the photos and images they collected. They also had to do the research to collect the facts for their script, so a lot of literacy skills were involved. Let us know what you think.

Feel free to post a comment on Lucia's blog post as well as here. Since the digital stories were created with PhotoStory and then uploaded to YouTube, it is also possible to embed them here, but let Lucia and her students know you viewed their work by posting to Lucia's blog, known as "Lucy's Blog." Here is the direct link to her blog post, "Literacy Project."

George Washington Carver




Wilma Rudolph

Digital Story: Take Two

Draft of digital story update: a bit late. Had to uninstall, reinstall, and work with Apple Tech Support on the phone for 1.5 hours to rectify issues with iMovie software. I know some of you had similar tech problems, so thought I would give that backstory.

I created this during our 3-foot dump of snow during the blizzard we had recently, and was dreaming of being back in Hawaii.

Like many of you, I hate my voice. The narration is clipped, so it has to be redone. I had some problems timing the narration to fit along with the photo timeline, so had to digress from my storyboard script and ad lip or pause in some wrong spots. Will also being considering another soundtrack. Skyped with middle school teacher from Honolulu last night, and she recommended several popular Hawaiian singers' songs to use. Need to look into that. In the meantime, used George Winston's "Living in the Country," from his album Summer that I downloaded from iTunes.

Still a work in progress, but also thinking might just move on to another digital story about another Hawaiian islands. 

How would I use this in my teaching? If I were still teaching junior high or high school English, I might implement these student projects: 

• Create a story about one or more of your favorite places. Describe the place and tell why you like it. 
• Take a digital story you created about your favorite place, and retell it adding dialogue. Get together with a partner and rotate speaking the lines, staying in the voice of specific characters.
• Create a digital story about the city or town where you live. Be sure the story tells the viewer about the sites.  Post the story on your blog to share with students in another school who can then respond back.  
• Create a digital story about the settings in works of literature we have read as class.

As for the second to last idea, sharing with another school, check this QuadBlogging project done by students in six varied countries:  Our World, Our Stories: School Day or The Local Environment.  Some of the students created videos to show others how and where they live.