Good morning everyone,

Many of us have fond memories of growing up with shows like Sesame Street and Zoom, places where we learned (albeit somewhat passively) about letters, words, numbers and facts, as well as about character education / social skills, the environment, even math, science and other core subjects. What was missing -  user involvement – has been made a great deal easier thanks to the Internet, and today, interactive websites with many of the same goals and objectives are easy to find. Today’s featured site, PinkyDinkyDoo.com, the companion to Noggin’s current show of the same name, really raises the bar in terms of user involvement and creativity, but it also adds an important dimension to the mix – storytelling. (I’d like to thank my dear friend and colleague Bernajean Porter, storyteller extraordinare, for sharing this gem!)

PinkyDinkyDoo is a massive site featuring a combination of online interactive activities (as well as offline printables) that affords the teacher and student many opportunities to play, learn and explore. The production quality, animations and layout are world-class. The overall site experience approaches the quality you’d expect from commercial software, and of course, it’s free.

But the big feature worth exploring on PinkyDinkyDoo is podcasts in the form of fun fill-in-the-blank excercises that ultimately generate slick finished, animated movies of the children’s own design:

Granted, there’s not a lot of input here – the kids are selecting from provided scenes and words – but myraid combinations are possible thanks to the wide variety of choices. The process is simple enough that young learners could easily create one on their own, and the quality of the finished product is amazing. The real value here isn’t in the final result, but rather, in the explosion of creativity in the minds of the students as they dream up their stories. It’s great fun and so easy. Give PinkyDinkyDoo a try today!

Hope this helps,

-kj-