Storybird
October 17, 2009
I’m on a blog writing roll this week aren’t I?
I picked up the following earlier –
which was followed by this tweet –
And being an inquisitive gal, I went and had a look.
What a brilliant tool! You’re provided with a vast array of images from different artists that you can use to make story books. You just choose the images and write the story. SOOOOOO exciting!
I wrote a story – click below to read it!
I’ll be writing more soon too.
And I can see pupils enjoying this too – lots of scope for description, imagination and creativity! For example, there are many monsters that could be used for physical description. There are animals for stories of the jungle and savannah and quirky characters just asking to be written about.
Not only a great tool for creating though – when you write a story you can choose to keep it private or make it public – and there are many many public stories so you need never be stuck for a story again!
Hi Lisa,Picking up on our tweets, I thought I'd share a few things about non-English Storybirds during our early days.Since we moderate all SBs that are submitted to the public library, we can't at this time accept languages other than English. However, those SBs can be used, personally or in the classroom, by keeping their setting "Private." We have hundreds of non-English teachers around the world who have been using SB this way since our launch a month ago.If you do want to share a private SB, use the "Send to Friend" link above the SB cover. That creates a unique token that enables the people on your list to view it even though it's not public.As we grow, Spanish will be the first non-English language we add. And, in seeing how quickly we're being adopted into homes and classrooms, we are exploring the idea of volunteer moderators for various languages to hurry up the process.Thanks ever so much for the kind words about Storybird and, importantly, your patience as we grow. m.Mark UryCofounder, Storybird
Thanks very much Mark.As you might have seen, I've updated my original post with the news!I'm still very excited about Storybird, as are other language teachers on Twitter; I'm sure you'd get several volunteers if you asked – me for starters!As I said, brilliant site and I'll carry on using it!Lisaxx
Hi Lisa,We're evaluating a volunteer moderation approach to help kickstart other languages (our original plan wasn't to offer Spanish for at least a year). But given the massive response we've had from non-English countries and teachers, we're trying to move this up the feature chain.We're building out a database of possible volunteers for language moderation. If you (and anyone else) would like to consider participating, please email support [at] storybird [dot] com and we'll get in touch as we move this ahead. Thanks much for the kind words, the tweets, and the ideas. You (and your language-endowed posse) rock!m.