Storybird－Unlock Imagination and Creativity

Ｗhat is Storybird ?

Storybird is a simply a storytelling platform, letting everyone make digital visual stories easy. They collect artwork form illustrators and animators around the world and inspire writers of any age to turn those images into fresh stories.

This is how it looks like when you enter Storybird.
Click Sign up for free.

Choose what are you.

Creating a story on Storybird is very straightforward and intuitive. My students of primary school in Taiwan would be capable of doing it even though the interface is in English. Let's look at a short tutorial I made.

What You Can Create on Storybird...

Picture books- multi-page, one page one image, short writing a page.

Longform books- multi-chapter, one image a page with long writing, several paragraphs.

poetry- one page, single, short writing, you can use the words it provides for that tag or use your custom word list. 

Storybird in Education

Storybird is a good platform of promoting reading and writing. Firstly, it is a work combining aesthetic and language. People like beautiful things undoubtedly. Secondly, it has some pedagogy underpinned. For example, it has reward system. You can win crowns (virtual money of Storybird) and win badges. Students earn 5 crowns for writing everyday. 55 crowns can be used to download the digital version of their own work which then they can print it out. It gives user positive reinforcement to encourage writing.

My badges

Badges from other user.

Various beautiful badges.

Thirdly, educators can add a class and onboard students directly by creating accounts or inviting them via class code. Teachers can create and issue assignments, moderate comments, review student work, apply a grade or comment. It can be one of the multiple assessment. On the other hand, students have access to the curated illustration library and use those images to illustrate their stories. Stories written by students will only be published within the class, allowing others students in the same classroom to comment an read. Although a students account cannot publish to public, they can still read and comment on stories Regular members have published to the storybird public library. They may also subscribe to other public members' stories.

Fourthly, teacher can create a classroom library within the class while students can also create their own library on Storybird.

This is how a teacher account looks like of the class.

Last but not least, it gives a great media to let students imagination and creativity fly! These two traits is so important in nowadays learning. Take picture books for example, students will need to find connections between each pages and use their imagination to create a story for those images. This also helps English writing as logic and coherence are two of the most vital in English writing. Students in Taiwan are kind of weak at English writing and I think one of the reason is that the writing logic and way are so different between English and Chinese. Thus, create a picture book, students need to make each page connected which would be logical and hopefully coherent.

Pros and Cons...

Pros:

★ You have so many pretty and interesting ready-made images from all kinds.

★ You can create a story by choosing from random artwork, specific tags or specific artists.

★ It' free unless you want to make print it out as a book, or buy works as frame-ready art prints, or greeting cards, etc.

★ It's user-friendly for a teacher to manage a class and student work. You set the assignment deadline and students will receive notification from the website.

You can see students git notification.

★ User-friendly for students even they are not good at English. It's just drag and type in word, very simple and intuitive.

★ Students works are private unless you share the link.

Cons:

▲ You can only use the image in the same category or the artist. It does not let you choose image across different tags.

▲ The layout of creating a picture book is not letting you find a suitable image easily because some images will be covered.

▲ It costs you crowns or money to download your work as PDF.

In all, this is about Storybird which I found it one day. I read many posts related to applying Storybird in their teaching and many recommendations. Storybird is worth trying to apply in my teaching. 

What do you think? 

Leave comments below! 

Thank you!