Storybird – Collaborative Digital Storytelling

For me to get excited about any digital learning tool, there must be a collaborative element to it. Storybird is a digital storytelling tool that allows students to create and publish extremely smooth picture books. Users are provided with numerous illustration styles that can easily be dragged into place on a blank page. Students can add their own text at the side or on the bottom of a page.

The Storybird desktop is very user friendly:

Collaboration is integrated into Storybird  in an authentic manner. Creators can invite others to contribute or “take a turn” on a story through an email invitation. Stories can be set-up as collaborative from the outset as well. The Storybird community is invited to leave comments and share stories. Students can benefit from simply reading the stories of other community members.

Storybird is teacher friendly as well by allowing for the creation of classes. Storybird is a “freemium” site. The free version is all that is needed to create stories. The premium features include tools for teachers such as an assessment and descriptive feedback function. The free version allows for one PDF download per student with the premium plans allowing for 150 – 300 per student. All plans allow for unlimited online creations.

Teachers are also able to assign stories online through the created class lists. The assignment screen is simple for the user and the teacher:

School is dead. Long live school.

“There’s no other technology in the world that 87% of the world’s population owns. And yet, despite mobile devices’ ubiquity and connectivity, we are only beginning to realize what’s possible.”

The above quote came from a recent article from Forbes online by Mark Fidelman.  Just like in the business world, education has barely scratched the surface of the possibilities for mobile technology. The growing power and access of mobile technology means that a major shift in both the public and private sector is coming. Fixed locations and workplaces become less relevant because mobile technology allows for quick collaboration and access through the ever-growing cloud. Without adaptations, many organizational models will crumble or risk becoming obsolete.

Adaptations are not always easy though. Fidelman quotes Lisa Bodell, author of Kill the Company,  “The very structures put in place to help businesses grow are now holding us back.” The high walls of protocol, policy, procedure and accountability have their place but they also prove stifling. We all know that this same problem exists in the education system as well.

Fidelman explores how corporate barriers prevented innovation leading to start-ups surpassing corporate giants:

Why didn’t Kodak invent Instagram? Fear of  non-revenue generation in the short while neglecting the potential windfall down the road. That windfall turned out to be $1 000 000 000 from Facebook.

Why didn’t Zagat invent Yelp? 28 year Zagat did not recognize the power of mobile technology. Google offered $100 million for Zagat while 8 year old

Yelp! harnessed mobile tech and has a market value of $1 billion.

Why didn’t the music labels invent iTunes? Rather than embrace mobile technology and start the revolution, the big labels pursued the path of litigation to prop up a dying model.

Are we going to be asking similar questions about the education system? The rise of web based learning platforms like Khan Academy, Udacity, iTunes University, and EdX are growing quickly. The start-up mentality of these companies makes them nimble and current. The education system moves with the pace and agility of a lumbering giant. While Bodell’s concept may be a bit extreme, we must undertake the hard changes before these changes are forced upon us.

A good first step for schools is Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) but tools alone do not solve the problem. We need to attack the larger issue of an engrained culture that resists innovation. In order to keep pushing forward, we must fight to have an educational culture that values growth and development. Without such a mentality our model risks obsolescence.

Flipped Classroom – Infographic

This blog and many others make frequent reference to the piece of ed jargon known as “The Flipped Classroom”. Sal Khan of Khan Academy fame has been a major force in pushing it to prominence but he is not the originator. This cool infographic from Knewton presents both the history and the details of this disruptive change idea.

 

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media