Blog Post Week 2 (2) - Technologies to support children's learning

Using Storybird to enhance children's learning

https://storybird.com/create/

I really liked Storybird as a digital resource to support children's literacy work. Storybird works by providing the user a visual image to inspire children's storywriting, enabling children to access to a creative context for writing that they will have established ideas about.

 I think that using storybird could be effective on school practice for showing children examples of other children's stories; to identify features of effective storywriting and increase their aspirations for their own writing. As a teacher you would have to be mindful of choosing the story you share beforehand, to ensure the content is appropriate for children. One final advantage of storybird is that you could embed children's stories to a class wiki page or school website for parents to read (home school link into learning).

UtellStory

http://www.utellstory.com/

Utellstory is a fantastic resource for making multimedia texts as children could combine photo with video, music, audio and supporting text. I thought that it could be used for a range of learning purposes, such as home projects that children could then share on the IWB in class or for assembly presentations. As the content of each story is entirely user generated, this allows great scope for presenting ideas on a range of contexts and wider themes. An additional educational benefit would be that the multimedia format provides a platform for discussion with children about engaging the audience with your presentation.