StoryBird is a collaborative digital storytelling tool. You can search from professional artists’ artwork to start building up your story and you can set up a class account, work and moderate your students’ works easily.

Start choosing one of the illustrators work  and simply drag&drop the images on the pages of your online book. Add your text and add more pages if you like. You can add other collaborators to your story and start building a story together. The best thing about this tool is that every story is being moderated when they are published.

When you finish, you can navigate the finished product by turning the pages virtually. You can share your Storybird with a link, embedding the story or mailing it.

Storybird is a great tool to support writing activities. The possibilities to use this tools in our classes are endless and here are a few of them:

Give the beginning of a story and ask children to complete the rest of the story.

Children can keep a diary of one of the character’s in one of the illustrations.

Children can create introductions for different topics.

It can be good to ask children to create an introduction about themselves using this tool.

Give text to the children and ask them to find pictures that go along with it.

Storybird can replace book reports, dialogues, letters and essays.

Children can rewrite and reillustrate a traditional story that we all know.

Children can choose the same topic with a theme, but they can come up with different stories.

Children can read a Storybird and they can answer questions about it.

Each class can create a class story in which each child contributes to the story.

They can read a Storybird and write an ending for it.

Storybirds can be a great way to illustrate poems.

Children can compare tow differents stories about the same topic.

Regardless the ages of the users, Storybird encourages creativity and collaborating. It’s an interesting and a fun tool to promote writing and reading activities.

Here is the next tool on the list: O

Our Story is a tool to make your timeline by writing your stories and adding pictures, videos and text.

Odiogo lets you give a voice to your text or your blog into speech.

Oddcast is a tool to create online talking avatars using text-to-speech application.

BuildYourWildSafe is a cool tool to create avatars using different animal parts and attaching them in a human body. Children can easily create a wild creature  following simple steps.

The best part about this tool is that you don’t need to sign up. Start with choosing the human body and browse through the different parts that you can add such as nose, hair, legs, arms etc.Then add some animals ears, bottoms, tails, backsides, arms , face and headgear. As you choose the body parts, you can also hear the sounds of the animals. When it is over, choose a background and click I’m done. Congrats! You have created your first wild self.

It gives you all the information about your new wild self. Print it out or mail it to others.

and, here are some ideas for you how to use this tool with your students:

Ask children to create their wild selves and write about what they can and what they can’t do.

Children can create a story about their new wild selves.

Show different wild selves and children can try to guess which animal parts you have used.

Print out some wild selves, as children describe their animals, the rest of the class try to create the same one as it is in the picture.

Children can describe their animals.

Children create a zoo photo album with their wild selves and their descriptions. They can even create their own “wild self zoo” on the bulletin board.

Children can write more about the animals that they have used on their wild selves.

Each child shows their wild selves, imitate their animals and rest of the class asks  some questions about them.

Show them a wild self picture, give them the beginning of the story and ask them to write or tell the rest of it.

This tool will be great fun for primary as it colorful, fun to play with and engaging.

Enjoy!

YouTube has been in the classroom for a long time now and ever since they became popular; we, educators have started using them for a wide range of purposes.

On the heels of understanding the educational value, we are all aware that there are a huge number of inappropriate videos, ads, comments and external links available.

 Here are some tools that you can use to clean up YouTube videos from the clutter of ads and comments and other extra stuff  if you are using it in and out of the classroom with your students:

SafeShareTV is a service that can be used to watch YouTube videos without viewing the ads, links, comments and the related videos around it. What you need to do is to go to SafeShareTV and copy & paste your link. It gives you a new link to view your video on a separate screen. You can view the videos full screen by right clicking on it. This tool also allows us to crop Youtube videos. It can be a good tool if we crop the beginning of the videos and ask children to guess what happens next or ask them to put the cropped videos into order.

ViewPure is another tool to watch safe videos on another screen. Just copy and paste your link and watch it in a separate screen. If you are giving YouTube homework, you can give the video link from Viewpure, it works very well.

YouTube XL is another service by YouTube itself for watching videos in a large screen without ads and comments. You can search videos using this service though it shows you the spotlight videos in the first screen but you can filter your videos using the settings. You can also create a list of videos to watch them in order.

Another way to get rid of all the extra stuff is to write “quiet” in front of the youtube video address. It takes you to a safe page where you can watch the YouTube videos.

CleanVideoSearch helps you to search YouTube videos without viewing the comments, ads and the sidebar. It also allows to choose how many videos you would like to see on each page.

Clea.nr deletes all the distractive features around the videos and it also allows to search Youtube without seeing any other extra stuff and search results.

Now, with these tips, it’s very easy to remove all the hassles that surround the clips and it’s good to welcome the world in our classes.