Digital Storytelling for Elementary Students

I am looking for feedback regarding the best free tools for digital storytelling for elementary and middle school students. What have you used? What do you like and don't like?

Tags: digital, storytelling, tools

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Permalink Reply by Syrita on December 16, 2008 at 1:54pm

I am going to be having 4th and 5th grade students work on digital stories. Any ideas on the easiest (student friendly)method to record voice and music together. I have created digital stories w/voice. Although, in Photo Story 3, which is what we are using, I haven't found the best way to have music throughout the story as well as a voice tied to an individual slide. Any ideas? Let me through in...I won't be able use any other software than Photo Story 3 for the slides (on district PC's), but I am willing to download software on my personal laptop to record voice over.

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Permalink Reply by Marcel Sanchez on December 18, 2008 at 6:24pm

There is a new web 2.0 tool that works great from what people have been telling me. Fooled around with it a little, the interface is easy to use and there is no download required. You can check it out at Mixbook.com.

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Permalink Reply by Donna Hebert on February 11, 2009 at 6:03pm

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this discussion. :-)

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Permalink Reply by Cory Tressler on February 11, 2009 at 7:16pm

PhotoStory is a great starter program for creating stories with digital pictures or scanned images or artwork. PhotoStory is extremely kid friendly. You can narrate slides individually. I have used this starting with 1st graders.

Movie Maker can be used for mixing still pictures and videos together, then use Audacity as a narrating tool. Movie Maker is a little more advanced, should be used in grades 4 and up.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Cummins on August 28, 2009 at 3:19pm

If you are looking for some great resources tools and e-learning apps that will make your professional life a great deal easier check out my blog at www.edgalaxy.com with regular updates and lesson plans.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Cummins on August 28, 2009 at 3:20pm

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Permalink Reply by Teresa Roebuck on December 14, 2009 at 9:52am

Try the tools associated with My eCoach. It is what we use as a basic foundation for our online community at the Global Association for Teaching Excellence.
All the work that any of our members, and by default, their students do while in the site always belongs to the creator. There is also no advertising in member pages or on private pages at eCoach.
Excellent tools! Can do so much with them!

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Permalink Reply by Mark Cruthers on December 14, 2009 at 12:57pm

Try WiZiQ

Storytelling & Cultures by Nellie Deutsch

Get your own Virtual Classroom

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Permalink Reply by Chris Hale on December 14, 2009 at 1:07pm

I have used Photostory with my high school students with considerable success. As for an applicaiton at the elementary and middle levels, I think it will work great there too. My own children (grades 1-7) have all created interesting products with Photostory. All the students need are pictures they can grab from the Internet or take themselves.

A word of advice, though, is that pictures taken from the net need to be a reasonable size (100+ k) or they are blury when converted to the video. Also, any text added overtop will be blurry also.

An interesting suggestion to work aroun this is to created a slkide in Powerpoint and save it as a jpg which can theyn be imported into Photostory like a regular photo. I have not tried it, but the reasoning is very sound.

The board i teach in has created a wiki with the information from the PD on Photostory in case you are interested: http://ocdsbphotostory.wikispaces.com/

Enjoy and have fun!
Chris

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Permalink Reply by Neal Grigsby on December 24, 2009 at 11:20am

Hello all,

Neal from Tikatok here. Thanks for your comments about the copyright policy. We are in the process of updating the User Agreement to reflect that authors will own all original materials that they submit to Tikatok. Tikatok will own any underlying Tikatok templates that are used by the author while on www.tikatok.com, as well as any other content that is licensed from third parties by Tikatok.