Pre-Kindergarten Memories: A Digital Story

What better way to reflect upon the year then to create a digital story about it?
That's just what we did. Most of my students entered my classroom not knowing their letters, sounds; how to read or write; and some had never held a pencil...I'm so proud of all that they've accomplished this year. Thanks to my Integrating Technology and Literacy grad class, I'm able to share their progress with you in the form of a digital version of our last class book of the 2013-2014 school year.

Pre-Kindergarten's end of the year bulletin board

In class last week I learned a tip about creating captions in a voicethread story. I took a screenshot of the child's work, put it in powerpoint and typed in my caption. All I had to do was screenshot the powerpoint slide, and save it as a picture. In vociethread i was able to select the original picture, select "replace" and change the old picture for the one with the caption. As long as I selected "change/replace" the children's reading remained with the slide. There are still some little tweaks I would have made (like making sure the dotted line text box or mouse arrow was not on the page when I took a screenshot) but lesson learned, and my next one will be even better.

The end of the year in pre-k is a really exciting time because the kids have a good sight word vocabulary and are using these words in their writing. My students are really excited about reading and writing time and everybody loves a read-aloud, from this class assignment I have learned that technology can help combine the two into a digital story.

Knowing their page will be in a class book gives the kids a little extra motivation to do their best drawing and writing. The challenging part of writing time with younger students is getting them to read back their writing. Reading their words on audio recording allows my students to hear themselves read. If they didn't like the way they sounded they were able to rerecord until they were satisfied. This was great practice for them. Now that the book is together it can be used just the same as any other class book, provided the technology is available. The story is bookmarked on the classroom computer and on my phone, for the students use. The kids LOVE hearing themselves and their friends reading the story. Another perk of technology, unlike a class boo that has to remain in- class, a digital class book can be emailed or even texted to families!

And now here it is...the final draft of my second digital story, "Prekindergarten Memories in Room 11" (with captions):

Digital Story Round 2

After spending about an hour stringing together my students videos, adding captions and effects I learned about voicethread. We experimented with this website in class- it basically gives the same effect as the digital story I made, but in a LOT less time. 

On our second to last day of school, writing time was about our favorite pre-kindergarten memory. (Hint--ask children this question BEFORE you finish your curriculum and spend a week of going on long neighborhood walks and picnic lunches...almost every child wrote about our week of fun.) We did our writing, I took a picture and had the children come over to me and read their sentence. 

The most exciting part...you can do this all on your phone with the free voicethread app!I took a picture of each page (take pictures in the order you want them to appear, you can't drag pictures around like you can on the computer version), then had the kids come up one at a time to read their sentence. The app counts down for you "4, 3, 2,1" then your picture appears and you speak. The picture will appear on the screen for as long as you speak. 
HINT: you can't crop the sound effects on voicethread like you can with windows live movie maker, so make sure to re-record if there is a huge pause that you don't want to appear in your story.You can preview the comment and choose if you would like to save or re-record, so this is easy. 

There are less effect choices than movie maker, but I found voicethread much more user friendly and for a busy classroom teacher- it's the perfect tool to make a quick digital class story. 
I attempted to add captions to the voicethread just like I did in movie maker, but the text shows up as a comment on the side after the speaking rather than under the picture as the child reads like I wanted. I still have more playing around to  do, but for now- here is my first attempt at a voicethread digital class book:

"Where can we see red?" A Digital Story

For my class digital story project I decided to make a class book with my students. This week our new sight word was "red" so we went on a color hunt around the classroom then students had to draw a picture and write a sentence about what they found. 

Since the kids loved seeing their sight word animoto I decided to turn our paper book into a digital version. I have windows live movie maker on my laptop so I decided to try out that program. I took a video of each of my students reading their page then uploaded each page to movie maker. I added a title slide, which was pretty easy, then tried to add the "adult" spelling to their kid-spelled sentence on the screen. Adding in the text was a little tricky since I had to figure out how to time each text box to appear at the beginning until the end of each students page. I played around a bit with effects and found a transition that looks like turning a page, which I added to make it appear more book-like. 

I created this video in about 40 minutes while my kids were in special. Once they returned I  shared my work with my students. 
My kids were thrilled to hear their voices reading on the computer! Many of them couldn't believe it was really them. They were all really excited and we watched the digital story three times. 

Here is my first try with Windows Live Movie Maker; let me know if you have any movie maker expertise feedback! 

Hopefully you enjoy "Where can we see red?" nearly as much as my students did...

Look in the sky...it's a storybird

Tonight in class we were introduced to a new storytelling tool, Storybird. This website encourages storytelling by providing illustrations for adults and students alike to use to develop ideas to write a story. Liz, Amanda and I collaborated to explore this website and created a story inspired by the If you give a mouse a cookie series, called "If you give Hedgie an Apple." Check out our first try...



We spent some time looking through pictures to try and find inspiration for our story. We discovered that you have to use pictures all by the same illustrator throughout your story. We had a tricky time trying to figure out how to add and save pages and got a little frustrated with trying to place the images on a page. Once we figured it out and got our story going, we wrote it pretty quickly. I don't think the website is user friendly enough to use with my students, but I can see using it to inspire my students writing. I could begin a story, then ask students to add a page or write the ending in their writer's notebooks.