Students were introduced to a new online tool during our  club meeting.  It is called ZooBurst and it allows students to create 3D pop-up books online.

At our first class, students took pictures of one another.  I cropped these full-body pictures and added them to the Class Media folder for ZooBurst.  This allows students to add themselves and their classmates to their stories!  Also, we have a premium copy of ZooBurst for our class, which allows the students to add sounds (i.e. the bark of a dog) to their characters, as well as record their own voices into their stories.  

During our final class, students will have a chance to finish any stories that they have started.  We will save some time at the end of class for students to watch their own and their classmates stories.  Students have been so creative with their stories and they have had a ton of fun making their stories.  Take some time to take a look at what your child and his/her classmates have accomplished.

Reminder:  Students will take home their folders at the end of club.  Included in the folder is the website URLs and usernames and passwords for the online tools.  Students will be able to continue to create stories using LittleBirdTales and ZooBurst.  Let them show what they can do!

Class is going way too fast!  We have so many, many stories to write, but only so much time left in our afterschool club.

For the remainder of classes, students will focus on planning stories and then using the various tools to publish them.  LittleBirdTales is an awesome FREE website that we've used.  This allows students to upload their own hand-drawn pictures, type in the text of their story and record their voice reading the story.  What a great way for young children to express themselves and share their creations with family and friends.

Visit each student's page to 'experience' their story!

Three middle school students were able to lend a helping hand to the Digital Storytelling club last week.  The big buddies helped get students logged into the website where they were creating a digital storybook.  This involved uploading hand-drawn pictures, typing the text for each page and recording the student reading their book.  

We are off to a great start!  We were able to get tons done, but we have have tons more fun things to do!  

I've been playing around with this awesome presentation tool called Powtoon.  Wow, is it fun!  I've created a fun and entertaining way to present my information.  I created an introduction to digital storytelling to share with the students at our first meeting.

I have to stop playing with it for now or I might lose the entire day!

Checkout the Powtoon presentation on the Home page of this site.

It is Spring Break, but I am hard at work putting together activities for the Digital Storytelling after-school club that will begin shortly after we return from our break.  I am excited to teach this class and hope that you will check back often to see what sort of creative students we have here at Hillel Academy!