Fifty ways to spin a digital story begins with Steve Dembo taking us to Blabberize and the images in Discoverystreaming which we do have the right to republish. Using an image from Discovery Education, Elvis Presley is the subject of Blabberize. Speaking quietly does not move Elvis’s mouth very much; the louder the volume, the wider the mouth opens. Highly intuitive, Blabberize makes digital storytelling a breeze. Blabberize does not allow you to download your product, but SnagIt does, and let’s you save it to your desktop. Snagit is a PC app, not free, but has great 30-day free trials. On a Mac, you want Camtasia. Hypothetically, if you are doing an author report in first or second grade, you have your students write a script and turn it into a digital biography. While doing this Web 2.0 task will not raise test scores, Dembo reminds us that it allows us to tap into the inclinations of our digital natives. It doesn’t really change curriculum; it just makes it better, and there is almost no down time to “teach” Blabberize.

How many ways can you use Blabberize? Dembo asks and the chat room delivers:

ESOL students

from Sherri Lutwyche to All Participants:

genres

from Lori Sheldon to All Participants:

telling a fairy tale from another character’s point of view

from Rosanne Manmiller to All Participants:

use for great vocabulary words

from Jessica Lehtonen to All Participants:

pretend you are the author reading a passage

from Jeff Gentner to All Participants:

author bios

from Rita DiCarne to All Participants:

teach voice

from Taylor Pons to All Participants:

Spelling

from Brandi Maynard to All Participants:

To read stories–use a picture of the author

from Rosanne Manmiller to All Participants:

great beginnings of stories

from Jeff Gentner to All Participants:

listen to each other stories

from Julie-Anne Angell to All Participants:

instead of oral presentations

from Sherri Lutwyche to All Participants:

timeline

from Jeff Gentner to All Participants:

famous Americans’ speeches

from Kelli Erwin to All Participants:

Trip around the world

from Jessica Lehtonen to All Participants:

famous speeches

from Linda Waid to All Participants:

Bring historical character alive

from Brandi Maynard to All Participants:

To show where people come from around the globe

from Rosemary Bakhtiari to All Participants:

biographies

from Laura Lamont to All Participants:

Historical fiction/bio/auto bio

from Kathy Wray to All Participants:

soldier experience in the field

from Julie-Anne Angell to All Participants:

introduction to videos

from Sherri Lutwyche to All Participants:

travel guides

from Rosanne Manmiller to All Participants:

quotes of famous people

from Julie-Anne Angell to All Participants:

reminders!

from Jeff Gentner to All Participants:

times tables

from Kelli Erwin to All Participants:

Teach steps to a problem using talking numbers

from Kay Tibbs to All Participants:

procedures for doing an algebraic equation

from Julie-Anne Angell to All Participants:

images of mathematical symbols

from Linda Waid to All Participants:

Travel log and time lines

from Lori Sheldon to All Participants:

how a problem is solved, using math symbols

from Karen Hodges to All Participants:

talk through a problem

from Kathy Wray to All Participants:

number sense

from Jeff Gentner to All Participants:

problem solving

from kim caise to All Participants:

angles in architecture

from Rosanne Manmiller to All Participants:

explaining how to figure things out

from Rosemary Bakhtiari to All Participants:

graphing

from Jeff Gentner to All Participants:

operation process

Next way: ToonDoo lets you create a free comic strip, and again, you can go to Discoverystreaming to claim images you can insert into ToonDoo to create a comic or a graphic novel. Copyright safe because it’s Discoverystreaming. You do need to be registered and log in to ToonDoo, and Dembo has heard rumors that having 30 students with the same login would work.

GoAnimate lets you create animated comic strips and cartoons. You can use stock images, etc… or you can click “My Stuff” and you can import your own images, speeches…all from Discoverystreaming. Just about as intuitive a Web 2.0 tool out there, the beauty of this tool is its easy integration with Discoverystreaming. Want an Amelia Earhart image, speech, background from Discoverystreaming, you have it, and then you can use some of the stock images from GoAnimate to make multiple scenes with four tracks of audio: running dialogue between 2 students, music, and a speech. A robust tool. Amazing, Steve. How do you share it? Like Blabberize, you can get tricky with downloading it.

How about a non-traditional timeline for students in your classroom? Try OurStory. This clever tool lets you make each event on the timeline a separate story. It’s an online only; no clever way to download, but a great tool for a great story, and you can control the scale of the timeline, from 10 seconds to 10 years. But the timelines can be embedded into another site or linked. I have used this tool very successfully with a wide range of students and grade levels, and it is a truly impressive tool. One project suggestion with Halloween coming soon: I had my students trace the history of horror genres and this tool really gave them unlimited creativity. Love it!

Yet another similar storytelling device is Capzles. This tool lets you show the evolution of a concept, person, theme from beginning to end, using audio, video, text, sound, and again, you can have your students select all of these from Discoverystreaming. A great analysis and synthesis “creative brief” aka assignment for students.

Addressing a chat room question about districts blocking tools, Steve reminds us to go to the master list of 50 Ways where the tools are listed by category. If one is blocked, just keep trying to find one that is not blocked.

VoiceThread–Steve says it is so common we will just mention it and move onward.

MyPlick works back to curricular concepts really well, again referencing Discoverystreaming. Use clip art and sync it with audio, but unlike a PowerPoint that needs syncing, with MyPlick, the sync process is so simple because it aligns slides with presentation software (think Keynote for Macs). But on MyPlick, you can upload audio and slides themselves and all you need to do is click the “up” button every time you want a slide uploaded.

Steve’s essential question for each tool: will it raise test scores. No. But here’s his mantra, and I love it: each of these tools do one thing really well, and it could be used for a variety of different digital storytelling, mixing and matching toold to engage our digital natives. If we get engagement up, we have a victory.

A great resource on unblocking:
http://budtheteacher.com/blog/2009/10/03/would-you-please-block/

Bottom line: we really never expected Steve to cover 50 tools, but like his mantra, what he did, he did inimically well. With over 100 webinars offered this year by Discovery Education, we know there’s a wealth of resources for PD available to us. Steve reminds us that if it’s Tuesday, it’s Web 2.0. You might want to check this out as well, as CDW-G and Discovery Education help us understand Web 2.0:

Night, all!

 

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50 Ways to Spin a Digital Story
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