Storybird

Storybird is a great program for helping students feel creative. While I love to have students use their own imagination and practice their own drawing skills, this is a great way for students to learn to connect visual elements to written content. Part of me, the low-tech part, worries that this may discourage students from doing their own artwork, since their efforts may look somewhat amateurish or less polished than the professional illustrations. However, this might also encourage some artistically inclined individuals to explore graphic design or digital art.

When I first went to Storybird.com, it asked me how I would be using storybird. I clicked on Teacher/Educator and was walked through the steps of creating an account, including a username, password, and avatar picture. On the home page, you have the opportunity to add students, create a storybird book, check our student's progress, and invite students parents to view their published work. 

I really like that you first see the overview of your student's work and their current grade for their projects. 

There is also a moderate comment button, which is useful for teachers. Students are allowed to comment on each other's books, but since students can sometimes be cruel and harsh, particularly behind the anonymity of the internet, it is nice that teachers can maintain control of the comments and class environment. 

Storybird is a fun and exciting program for students. Being able to pull in professional illustrations into a self written story would have been a dream of a 8 year old me if I had thought it was even a possibility. You can either click on one picture and use the illustrations from that one author for a cohesive look or you can choose a theme like "butterflies" and choose from all the pictures dealing with butterflies from all illustrators.

There is also a poem option where students can set a background image and use the words in the sidebar to create poems. The limitations here are that you can't use any word you want, just the words provided. You can use the refresh button at the bottom right, but you lose all the words you had, including the ones you have already put on the image. 

One teacher I read about created a storybird with a lot of grammer and punctuation mistakes. The class then went through and corrected the story together and then published it to see the final result and read it together. I can see a librarian using this to create a storybird with factual errors about a historical event or scientific topic. Students could be assigned to correct specified pages, citing sources they used to find the true facts of the matter in correct citation format. The class could then read the book together to learn about the entire topic together. 

  Publishing removes the side panels we see above and presents a cleaner view of the final result. Once a book is published, we can share it with others. As I mentioned earlier, parents can be given an assigned password to view their student's published work. This gives the student a sense of privacy, since parents cannot observe the work they are still working on. Parents are only able to view their student's work, not the other students in the class, which means parents do not need to worry about other parents viewing their child's work. 

You are unable to simply print out a Storybird book, but if you really want to have a hard copy, you have a few options. They can purchase a picture book format for $16.99, purchase a high resolution copy to print out themselves for $2,99, or buy a softcover version for $6.99. The poetry option can be purchased as an art print ($24.99), a 10 count notecard set ($16.99), and a greeting card download for ($1.99). 

As reasonable as the prices are, I love that Storybird is free to use in a digital format. It gives students and teachers the option to work with professional illustrators.

I think storybird is a fun way to get students excited about books and book writing. After discussing how a book is made, maybe reading Adam Rex's book How This Book Was Made, as well as Mark Peet's This is my Book to interest students in the topic and discussing what the author does and what the illustrator does.