Thing 4: Digital Storytelling & Presentation Tools

I am so excited that this topic was added to Cool Tools for School this year! From my experience, students love writing their own stories.

In the past I've had students create their own original fables, stories, or nonfiction reports. They have used a variety of methods ranging from paper and art supplies to Storybird or Google Slides.
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So I began by eagerly reading 6 Reasons You Should Be Doing Digital Storytelling with your Students. The author of that article asserts that digital storytelling teaches the writing process while increasing the students'  technology competence and providing a creative means of assessment.

I was excited to try out Little Bird Tales but then I discovered that data storage for the free version only lasts 90 days. However, when I went back and looked at the other digital storytelling options, I realized the Little Bird Tales had the features that I was looking for:

• You can embed the stories in a blog.
• You can draw online or scan artwork.
• It is a safe web site for children with no pop-ups, ads or links to other web sites.
• The public stories have been filtered by monitors so there is nothing objectionable.
• You can upload photos and add text and voice.

A teacher subscription is $24.99 per year for 20 students and $1.25 for each additional student. I'm starting with a free 90-day trial.

I used part of a sample book that I produced in Google Slides about stingrays (see above) and uploaded some of those slides, adding chapter divisions using the "draw" feature and narrating the text. Here's the finished product!
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• Click to view my tale.
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