Story one is an amazing story because she is wonderful writer to start with but the iPod allowed her such creativity with the illustrations both hand drawn and copied off the internet. When she talked about her story, she loved the connection with Sherlock Holmes and creativity of the pig. Her story had amazing connections with our class read aloud Donavan's Word Jar and connections with our Life Science unit.
Story two is a creative fantasy story, and the setting was perfect since it was Halloween. Story two's author does not really enjoy writing, and I would have to say he is hesitant at best to write a story. However, the iPod has unlocked writing for him. I allowed him to compose the entire story on his iPod that was a HUGE release for me, but I was anxious to see if it would make a difference and it certainly did. The coolest part for me is the wide variety of figurative language. He used similes, idioms, alliteration, and onomatopoeia all of which had been the focus in our word study and poetry Friday. His choice of vocabulary was also impressive because he used the online thesaurus to help him with his choice of words. When we had his final writing conference, he was happiest about how he took a regular fish and changed him into a frightening, freaky, fat scuba diver. Sometimes as a teacher you just have to throw in your bait and see what you catch. This time I got a whopper of a good story.
Are you using StoryKit as a publishing tool or a creation tool? Do you ask students to draft their stories before they "publish" on StoryKit? What seeems to work best?
ReplyDeleteI am trying to help students see the iPod as another tool for their learning (just like a pencil or word processing program).
What a great question and the answer is yes to both!
ReplyDeleteI allowed the students to choose if they wanted to create the entire story on StoryKit. If they did the whole story on their iPod the kids used Simplemind app for their brainstorming. Others worked in their Writer's NB until the final project. Every student was required to present their final story using Storykit though. I believe this app took my class to the next level seeing their iPod as a tool similar to a pencil. This came over time because the students had to see beyond the "game" aspect of the iPods. As far as linking the stories to the blog it was crazy hard but I finally figured it out. I am thrilled that your class used our class stories as a model what a great learning tool for both of our classes. Let's keep talking I love it!