I've chosen a web 2.0 tool to investigate from Larry Ferlazzo's blog list, The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education — 2010. The list included many interesting tools that would be very useful in a classroom. I chose to play around with Story Jumper because I thought it might be a fun activity to do with my son. Story jumper is a website that lets you write, design and edit your own children's story book. You set up a user account allowing you to save the books you write and you may also purchase the book as well!
I found this website to be very user friendly and easy to use. Along with Dylan's help I was able to use a story that was already started, tweaked some names and characters and completed an entirely new and unique story book. You can check out our new story here.
I think this could be a very useful program in an inclusive classroom. I really liked that you had an option to start completely from scratch, or begin with a pre-designed template. Since I had no story line in mind when I visited the site, I chose to use a template that was already started. This really helped me get the story going. One of the hardest thing for many children, especially students with a learning disability, when asked to write is creativity. I found this to really help facilitate creativity by giving an initial starting off point.
We really had fun with this one. I'm sure we will be back to create more stories in the future!
This sounds like a great tool. Did you try it with your son? Your ideas for differentiation were great... especially for an inclusive classroom. I think I might ask you to adjust your font-- it is quite hard on my old eyes! Can it be made bigger?
ReplyDeleteI did try this with my son. A link to our story is actually in this blog entry. Anytime I link to something the font is blue. The sentence reads "You can check out our new story here". If you click on the word "here" it should direct you to our story. However I would like to add that I am not great at writing stories :)
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