More about Storybird

Some of my friends that have read our digital story, Simple Gestures, have been asking me questions about how it was created.  For anyone not familiar with Storybird, it is a website that facilitates the creation of digital stories.  Once you create a Storybird account, you will gain access to a variety of illustrations by numerous artists.  Once you find an illustration that catches your eye, or perhaps matches the story line you are going to write, you will choose the pictures from a collection by that same artist to accompany your text.  Here are a few examples of the collections.

Example collection of illustrations 

Example collection of illustrations 

Once you chose the art collection you want, you can pick pictures from the entire collection

From there, you decide which order you want the pictures to go in, and start to add text to the story.  Some authors go in with a story already created, or have a story in mind, and others use the pictures as their guide.  When writing Simple Gestures, it was our first time navigating Storybird, and we had no idea what we were going to write about.  By perusing the collections of illustrations available for our age group, we found one picture, the cover of the story, that grabbed our attention, and the story was born from there.

Once we had some ideas come together we really got into it, and wanted to create our best story.  Keeping in mind that this could potentially be used with our students, we incorporated story elements that students learn about in 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th grade.  Some examples include alliteration, writing with dialogue, describing the setting, and using sensory details.  

This text describes the setting and uses alliteration.

Here a lot of dialogue is being used to keep the story progressing.

One of the benefits of Storybird is that teachers can use it to create stories for their students, or the students can use it to create stories themselves.  For some students this would be very motivating, and I’m sure they could come up with a very creative end product.  Other students, might have a difficult time generating ideas, especially because some of the collections are very limiting, unless you really are creative and think outside the box.  When I try this with my students next year, I am definitely going to have them try it in pairs first.  

Give it a try in your classroom, and let me know what you think!