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

Below is my seven minute micropresentation from Teachmeet styley thingy (I think that name could stick!) at the eTwinning Ambassadors meeting #etwpdw.

In my seven minutes (I think the lovely @digitalmaverick gave me a little longer….) I talked about

1. using Wallwisher to collect ideas, have asynchronus discussions and review learning / progress.  I set up an example Wallwisher just prior to my presentation and asked my Twitter pals to contribute.  Thank you!

2.using Google Maps to keep an online track of postcards being exchanged in our eTwinning project Greetings across the miles, as well as cards from Postcrossing.  The actual postcards are displayed on the school wall, but by plotting them on a Google Map pupils get an idea of how far the cards have travelled, the position of countries and much more that enhances and extends the experience beyond a piece of paper arriving in the post.

3.using Storybird to write collaborative stories.  I ran out of time at this point and had to be very brief but my idea was to use Storybird to write stories across countries as follows –

• agree on a set of visuals.
• each group writes the story in their own language -or in a common one.
• stories are shared.

I bet no two stories would be the same!

As soon as I liberate it from @digitalmaverick, i’ll upload the video of my presentation.  But until then, if you have any questions, please contact me.