EXPLORING TOOLS : STORYBIRD

Hello everyone !

My friend Ecem and I gave a presentation about Storybird and in this post I will inform you about it and hopefully it will give you some ideas on how to encourage your students to develop writing skills without boring them.

Storybird is a simple tool which allows its users to create visual stories. You can put your imagination into words using different artworks provided by artists on Storybird.

Firstly, you have to create an account to be able to use this tool and it is free. After signing up, you click on the ''Create'' at the top left of the screen. You will see many different pictures and you can also search for certain categories like ; summer,holiday,animals etc. 

Once you choose the artwork you are interested in, you click on the artwork and in the following page you select the book format by clicking ''Use This Art''.

As you can see, you have three options. Briefly, a longform book has chapters and less artwork, a picture book consists more artworks and a low word count and lastly a poem is a single image with selected words.

After choosing the book format (I chose the picture book format to show you), you are provided with other pictures related to the first one you chose. You drag other pictures as you write the story, adding pages.

Also, for the cover of your book, you have four different options.

When you complete your story, you click on ''Save and Exit'' and publish it. You can share your story privately or publicly. You can write a summary of your story. You can always edit your story,too.

To share your story, again from the top left of the page, you click on ''You'' and then ''Your Stuff''. After selecting your story, there is a share button. If your book is private you can share it via e-mail or with its link. If your book is public, you can also share you story on social networks.

The final product can be printed or downloaded as PDF but you have to pay for these options.

We created a picture book story for our presentation,too. As our story is private, I can't embed it here but I will share the link of it : Precious Love

Longform book example

Poetry Example

How this tool can be used in language teaching ?

- Firstly, teachers can create a class system on storybird and give students a class code so that they can work together.

- As a teacher, one can upload a specific picture and then ask students to create a story based on this picture. You can also specify a theme for them.

- Students can create their novel stories. After choosing a picture from the Storybird collection, students can build a story around the pictures which are related to first chosen one.

- A teacher can start writing a part of the story and then ask students to continue writing on it respectively. This is also possible for a student, he/she can begin with one sentence and others continue.

- They can be given certain words to create a poem, using a related picture. For example, you can ask them to choose an emotion and create a poem describing it.

- Students can be organized in pairs and then they can write two different stories. Students can invite one another to their stories. After finishing it, students can edit each others story and also comment on it what they like or don’t like about it. They can find each others mistakes like grammatical ones or misspelled words.

Storybird is a really fun and effective tool for students to develop creative thinking and writing skills.They learn how to write a story, like story flow or using descriptive language for stories in the target language. Also it encourages collaborative working and students become connected with each other which creates a more comfortable learning environment. So give it a try if you have not yet !

I hope that this is helpful, I will be talking about another useful tool in my next post, do not forget to check it !