2simple software
2Create a Story
Enables young children to make interactive multi media stories. Children’s work and case studies using 2 create a story available at:
2CAS world stories
[www.2simpleworld.com] [www.2simpleworld.com]
SSAT schools children’s work
2animate competition children’s work
[www.2something.com]— [www.2something.com]
Children’s animations
Available on [www.2something.com]
Various ways in which young children have used the 2Simple to tell a story in pictures. This package provides facilities to animate the graphics.
Special Needs teachers may find this information about story telling and autism useful.
The move from page to screen: the multimodal reshaping of school English
Carey Jewitt Institute of Education, University of London (2002)
This book has an excellent section on Mice and Men on CD used in the classroom which highlights the impact that using a computer has on the process of understanding a story. ?
Visual Communication Journal
Edited by Carey Jewitt
The Visual Communication Journal will take professional educators out of their comfort zone and provide food for thought. The journal serves as the official journal of the International Graphic Arts Education Association, and provides a professional communicative link for educators and industry personnel associated with design, presentation, management, and reproduction of graphic forms of communication. However, many educators publish in this journal.
Don’t forget simple, free but powerful tools such as PhotoStory3 from Microsoft. It turns stills into video by using rostrum panning and allows the addition of graphic effects as well as narrative.
I have just used it in a G+T project where groups of pupils (mixed ages from Y5 to Y8) had to use this very simple tool to create a presentation that would persuade the management of Intergalactic travel Inc. to make their biome the preferred stop on Earth. It is less about the tool you use than what you do with it!
Kar2ouche (not free!) has all the appeal of an avatar based environment and is flexible enough to use in many more contexts than the package notes would suggest.
Neither of these are Web 2.0 based (unless you then go on to share the resulting QT or wmv files with peers through an on-line environment such as You Tube), but are a great first step to get teachers to understand the key features of visual narrative.
Some extra info on Quest Atlantis.
This is a research project from Indiana University and The National Science Foundation in the USA.
“Quest Atlantis (QA) is a learning and teaching project that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse children, ages 9-12, in educational tasks. Building on strategies from online role-playing games, QA combines strategies used in the commercial gaming environment with lessons from educational research on learning and motivation. It allows users to travel to virtual places to perform educational activities (known as Quests), talk with other users and mentors, and build virtual personae. A Quest is an engaging curricular task designed to be entertaining yet educational”
Quest takes the form of a narrative based adventure and there is a novel called “Archfall” which leads students into the narrative and therefore eventually the role play through narrative that forms the Quest Atlantis World.
Useful Communities
The National Association for the teaching of English has plenty of books and references about using story telling in classrooms.
