All people have creative abilities and we all have them differently. I know that when individuals find their creative strengths, it can have an enormous impact on self-esteem and on overall achievement. I experienced that last week as I created examples of the fractured fairytales using Toontastic and the comic feature in Book Creator.
The past two weeks have been an interesting week for me. Hilary and I have been working with Tiffany on creating fractured fairytales using iPad Apps. The entire experience for me personally has been challenging. After researching and seeing the pros and cons of different apps we finally decided on choosing Toontastic, Stop Motion, Powtoons, Puppet Pals and Book Creator. We worked hard on creating examples and in the process discovered how much planning it takes to create an effective digital story. You can view some of the examples here.
Creating a good digital story is definitely time consuming and made me realise that if it took me so much time to create an example it would take the students time to become familiar with a tool and then employ it for their project. We wanted to give students choices in order for them to decide which tool would serve them best. The solution was to allow the students to explore each tool with some guided practice.
We decided to do tech rotations by setting up different stations that would give the students the opportunity to come and explore the app for 20 minutes before they moved to the next station. Without this kind of exposure to different choices we could not expect our students to create meaningful pieces of work that showed their applied understanding of using a tech tool.
This project is in the process now and even though it is time consuming it makes it worthwhile as we know that it gave the students a chance to explore different apps and investigate questions they may have had in regards to the technology they used. By taking the time at the beginning, students saved time when they started creating their stories. Tiffany did an amazing job having the kids ready with their storyboards and completed fractured fairytales. Look at this space for the stories to come to life when they are finished. If you wish for us to come and work with your class in exploring these different apps please schedule a time to meet with Hilary. We would love to come and work with your kids and expose them to these apps that would bring their stories to life.
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