Category: Storybird

This story has beautiful illustrations to help talk about the weather in Spanish.

¿Qué tiempo hace? on Storybird

A new Storybird that has not been seen previously, especially for Halloween – and specifically written for RGo at WCPS ;o)

Count with Calabaza (Pumpkin) from 0 to 9, and then find the Halloween objects in the story.

Hope you enjoy it!

UPDATED October 2020

Storybird have changed the ability to share so here it is narrated as a PPT.

Another Storybird, this time with more text.

“Mis amigos raros is a Spanish story about Eduardo’s friends who are all a little out of the ordinary.”
Mis amigos muy raros. on Storybird

¿Qué haces en tu tiempo libre? on Storybird

I’ve decided to (re)publish my Storybirds over the next few days. Here’s the first, a very very simple ‘story’ about colours in Spanish.
Los colores on Storybird

In celebration of the new features of Storybird, I’ve been back to the site and had another play around and written a new book!

I’ve written about Storybird before here, here and here. Oh, and here and here too!

New things on Storybird that I think are particularly useful from an educational point of view –

1. No more Flash so you can use and view the Storybirds on any smartphone or devices including iOS such as iPads and iPod Touch devices. This also means that you can write Storybirds in scripts that do not use Latin characters such as Greek, Mandarin and Arabic.

2. More categories, making it easier to search for a story written by someone else, and also filter for age appropriate stories.

3. New ‘create’ page and new covers.

HOWEVER,  you may now be able to write in other scripts but you still can’t publish them to the PUBLIC gallery, nor can you publish in any language other than English. The Community Guidelines state

‘While we celebrate all cultures and languages, we can not at this time moderate and thus approve Storybirds for the public library that are written in languages other than English. We will be expanding internationally soon, and we will add specific language support as we do. In the meantime, the stories can still be published in your private library and shared with your family and friends.’

Whilst I know that this is a small company and moderation in lots of languages costs money, the MFL Twitterati did offer to help, and I’m sure that offer still stands?! And I wonder what their plans are – the site is now 3 years old. I will tweet and ask. Watch this space!

UPDATE

Here is the Twitter conversation with Storybird! (NB read from bottom up!)

So it seems we have a while yet before we can freely share our Storybirds on the site.

HOWEVER, to get around this, you can embed them into a blog (as I have here), or share the URL of your Storybird (I shared with my own email address then opened the book and copied the URL)

And there is also the wonderful MFL Storybird wiki. Whilst the URL way will still work, the fact that you are now given an embed code means that the books can now be embedded on the page and read there and then rather than having to be transferred to Storybird.com to read!

A shame that you have to “know the right people” to be able to access all these stories in other languages but better than nothing!

La vida sana. on Storybird

I had a lovely time with some delegates this morning talking about storytelling using ICT – ‘digital storytelling’

Here’s my presentation – possibly won’t make much sense until it has the sound added, but you’ll have to wait a bit for that until I get the file back from Joe Dale’s iRiver.

Also, there is a document containing all the notes from the session.

Tell me a story session notes

Tell me a story presentation

Links that I missed off the list – MFL animation themed!

Catherine Elliot – www.twitter.com/catherinelliott

http://ssclc.wordpress.com

http://bit.ly/efSmim – Joe Dale interviews Catherine

Oscar Stringer – www.twitter.com/ostringer

http://www.animationforeducation.co.uk/ – go to Film examples – MFL

Any questions or queries, feel free to contact me

On Friday, I hit BETT in London.  I didn’t really see much on Friday apart from some wonderful presentations as part of TeachMeetTakeover which I was helping coordinate for the day.

TeachMeetTakeover is a sort of ‘organised flashmob’ idea where companies offer their stands for half hour / hour slots to be used by someone talking about free ideas that they’ve used in their classroom.  There were presentations throughout Thursday, Friday and Saturday – the variety of ideas can be seen from the wikispace, which also shows how many offered but didn’t get to take part.

Having snaffled a helium balloon from a stand, I taped the logo to it and flew it by presentations – it seemed to make people stop for that all important three seconds it took for them to be drawn into the presentations!

My presentation was on the Babcock4S stand – and I have to say a huge thank you to Dan and the team for their welcome – and the beer!

Below are the slides from my talk entitled ‘Free stuff doesn’t have to be pants!

A lady from IRIS Connect was videoing it – if it gets published, I’ll upload the link! UPDATE – blog post with link

And look!  Just found this photo on Flickr that was taken during my presentation – you can see my legs just under the banner!

From Foto’s Frans Peeters on Flickr

Here is the Slidecast of my second presentation from Brighton.

Apologies for the audio cutting out before the end – no idea what happened there!  Perhaps the iRiver overheated!

Apologies to @wizenedcrone for forgetting her real name – it’s Fiona Joyce!!!

And the German site I mentioned was called GenkiGerman.

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/AYG_138C]