The tech club meeting this Thursday really encapsulated the ups and downs of teaching. The students used an online program called storybird and one of the tech club members (kara bates) signed onto all the computers and the students created a story. Even though I attempted to get the group together to figure out how it works the group didn't want to do that so only Kara knew how it. The website allows students to pick an artistic style they like and then create a story around pictures that, that artist has created. Some collections have 4 or 5 dozen pictures, some have about a dozen. The students were instructed to pick a style they liked, then create a cover with their first name and a title of the book. Some students got upset because the pictures did not allow them to tell the story they wanted. One student did not want to do it at all and instead wanted to go ice skating. Regardless we pushed through. Each page was to consist of one picture and at least two sentences about the picture in regards to the story being told. The students completed as many pages as they could in the 30 minutes of allotted time. After the time was over (we had two groups) the students were asked if any of them wanted to read their stories and they were told they could complete their stories next week.
The second group was very productive, some students got to 8 pages and some got to 3. The program worked better the second time because all the tech club members understood how it worked while the first time we didn't. With a focus on typing using the homerow the students performed well enough for primary education students. There were common questions "how do you spell this," and "I am done with this page now what." And with four members of the tech club helping six students the questions got answered quickly. At the end almost the entire second group wanted to read their story out loud and the stories were comical, but did not exactly connect the pictures together. It was more a story about adventures various characters were having and each page was a new adventure. This works well enough but for older students I believe that there should be more 'connective tissue' between the pages.
One very funny part was two male students used a set of pictures that were meant to be the Lilad by Homer. One students decided his pictures were about the Revolutionary War, and the other student thought it was about "Warriors."
Next time I would have every member of the group understand how to use the program before attempting to tell students how to work it. Also give older students more instruction, more sentences, make each picture have to be related to the last one. But otherwise allow the student to develop creativity. I would keep this online website as a source for further enjoyment, but I can't understand how to use this creative tool in the classroom.
