Storybird: Making Picture Books Online

This week, I explored online picture book creation tools (or comic strip creators, although I completely disagree with that description.) Storybird is a cute website that features tons of artwork from uploaders from all around the world. You can use these artworks to create a picture book, a full chapter book, or even just a poem. Then you can share your story with others or even publish your story on the website for anyone to view.

Here is the link to the story I made using Storybird, which is the tale of a lonely young girl whose wish for a friend is granted by the Princess of Heaven. It was a fun experience to make the book, but I will say that it was a little difficult to find enough corresponding images to make a full story.

If I were to use this online picture book creation tool with students, it would be as a general writing project for intermediate level ESL students.  I could use it to test students' story structure understanding by making sure students create a story with a beginning, middle, and end, including an obvious conflict. I would also be checking the students' use of punctuation when writing quotations in English (comma placement, quotation marks, proper placement of sentence ending punctuation markings, etc.)

Due to the difficulty I encountered finding enough coherent pictures to make a full story, I would not limit the students in any way other than the objectives I stated in the paragraph above. Students would be able to write about any topic of their choice using Storybird OR they could create a picture book with pictures from elsewhere.

Gathering and Organizing Info Online

This week I used two different sites to gather information, including ideas and supportive professional texts online: Pinterest and Diigo. 

I found that Pinterest is incredibly helpful for gathering small amounts of information, such as plans for in-classroom activities. This is because Pinterest utilizes an image as a link to further reading, which gives people the chance to gather much of the central information at first glance. Pinterest also has the ability to create various "Boards" where you can save these image links--like creating a virtual collage board!
 This site is bright, colorful, and easily comprehensible to new users due to its visual nature. I personally love Pinterest and have been using it for many years to organize my preexisting thoughts and ideas, as well as search for new ideas in areas that I am already interested in. The latter is especially easy to do because Pinterest offers suggestions for related pictures and articles, so a related idea is just a scroll away! Multiple users can also collaborate using Pinterest, as more than one person can be allowed to add Pins (picture links) to a Board.

Diigo is a site that allows you to bookmark other websites, organize them into various lists, and access them through any server. You can also highlight text in a website and save it for review on Diigo, as well as taking notes on the site. I think that this is a good tool for people who read and sift through huge amounts of information on a regular basis. For example, when doing research for a term paper, Diigo would be a helpful site to organize references and focus on the important parts of all that you read.
You can also work collaboratively on Diigo by forming a Group where saved websites with relating tags will be shared.

While both of these site can be effectively used to save and organize information found online for future uses, I think that they serve different purposes: Pinterest being for quick ideas and Diigo for research and further reading. Being that I am a visual learner, Pinterest is something that I will definitely continue to use. Diigo, however, is not as engaging to look at and--in its essence--requires a lot of reading to digest information. It is unlikely that I will use Diigo all that much in the future--simply because I don't revisit too many websites.

Teaching in "The Present Future"

My boyfriend and I are two very different people. I am content to relish in what is and what has been, with only mild excitement about what is to come (where society and technology are concerned.) He, on the other hand, has frequent episodes of extreme excitement and anticipation about what he calls, "The Present Future," meaning things happening now that will directly affect the trajectory of our future world/society.

Today, I watched video called Shift Happens. I found it hard to watch actually: a slightly-too-fast-paced slide slow of "Did You Know?" facts about how the world is not the same as it was a few years ago, set to very distracting music. The video focused on the population changes and technological changes that have happened recently--just the sort of things that would spark my boyfriend's interest.

For me though, the most interesting fact presented by the video was this: "There are over 12 billion Google searches performed each month." The video then followed up this fact with a question that really struck me:

"To whom were these questions addressed before Google???" 

As an aspiring educator, I can't help but think that many of these questions were previously asked of teachers before the internet age! This idea made me feel sad and at a loss for how I can impact students in a relevant way when Google seems to have a corner on my job.

But then I watched another video, this one called A Vision of 21st Century Teachers. This is a very encouraging video for any teacher who is feeling dwarfed by technology. The simple video style and friendly faces calmed me down at once, reminding me that yes, technology has a huge impact on us all nowadays, but teachers still have a big role to play!

Teachers can use tech in the classroom in so many different ways--which means that no creativity is lost on our part! It's up to us to not only utilize technology as a learning tool to teach other materials, but in doing so we may also shape how students view and use technology throughout the rest of their lives.

So whether you're the type of person who relishes at the thought of change or someone who is a little less ready to jump into a new world, rest assured that as a teacher you will always have a massively important job to do.