Good morning all!
Came across this great resource via tweet from Sheri Burkeen, an Early Childhood Center Technology Coordinator for PK-SK girls based in Memphis, Tennessee. And what a find it is! Perfectly suited for after-school summer fun (camp counselors, take note):
My StoryMaker is a free, easy-to-use, Flash-based interactive story development platform developed by The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, with the generous support of Carnegie Mellon University and The Grable Foundation. The basic idea is that you start by selecting characters and a goal:
(Note: in my opinion, it would be helpful for students to explore the site first to get acquainted with the characters, settings and other available elements prior to developing their story.)
You are then presented with a basic editor (with a handy talking “Story Helper” guide present at all times):
and you start creating the story by adding characters, items, objects, settings & dialog (some of which is automatically generated):
You then simply drag, drop and arrange the items you want, adding dialog and pages, etc., until your story is finished. When you are done, you can choose to “share” your story, which generates a unique six-digit number that can be plugged into the StoryMaker main site and retrieved! But wait, it gets better … you can also choose to PRINT the finished story, generating a wonderful, colorful, foldable custom book! This is just too cool! It could be used for SO many language arts projects. Best of all, the interface is highly intuitive / extremely simple and no registration is required – just visit the site and start creating!
Hope this helps!
-kj-
6 responses so far ↓
1 Kevin Hodgson // Jun 4, 2009 at 6:06 am
Great find. I need to check it out.
Kevin
2 Michelle Bourgeois // Jun 4, 2009 at 8:10 am
Nice! I’m sitting here prepping for a workshop on storytelling and this tool is a perfect fit! Thanks so much for sharing!
3 David Kapuler // Jun 4, 2009 at 10:09 am
Great reviw, here’s mine w/ a video example…
http://cyber-kap.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-storymaker.html
4 Gary Bennett // Jun 4, 2009 at 12:36 pm
I love the site–but there doesn’t seem to be any way to archive the story with the animations. The magic number only links to a pdf of the book. I think students would love to share the animated story book even more than a paper bound version. This is an unfortunate limitation.
5 David Kapuler // Jun 4, 2009 at 12:48 pm
I had the same thoughts, it would be much better to be able to export some kind of video file. You lose all the animations getting it as a PDF.
I had to use a screen recording app, to turn my story into a Quicktime movie. If I was going to do this w/ a class, I would have to do a similar work-around which is a lot of time.
6 Kevin Jarrett // Jun 5, 2009 at 5:43 am
Thanks for the comments everyone!
David, I love your video – very helpful! Think how much time I would save if I did videos instead of blog posts … hmmmmmmmmm!
Gary, that is a shame about the magic number linking to a PDF! Seems to (mostly) defeat the purpose of a shareable link, the loss of animation is too significant. It’s understandable, though, from an architecture standpoint (generating and storing the .PDF is probably a lot easier than making the whole story ‘live’ via the site).
David, I wonder if the site developers could implement a direct export to video…? Hmmm!
-kj-
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