CALL Review III : "Storybird"

This is my third CALL Review III, and sadly this is my last CALL Review.
But it just means the end of official CALL Review. My mini Reviews will be posted continuously!!

Here is the link of "Storybird" website. http://www.storybird.com/

Briefly, Storybird can become writing tool and reading tool at the same time.
In this review I will especially focus on the writing part.

Anybody can create his or her own stories with this tool.
The most significant feature of this tool is that you can insert a great number of high quality illustrations in your stories.

This video will will give you an elaborate explaination of how to use Storybird.






Here I upload three pictures that show three types of reading tools of Storybird.

This is page for making "picture book". You can add many pages as you want, and each page has one artwork(an illustration). You can drag artwork then you can change the position of the text part of a page.

 


























This is "Long Book" form. You can make one long story with many artworks. When you finished some chain stories, you can post it in the form of a series story like chapter1, chapter2, chapter3, and more like this way.






























Lastly, this is poem making with word boxes on the page. You can freely drag words and can make your own poem. However, the limitation of word is its shortcoming. And if you click refresh button, all the words are changed. That means your poem which is being composed would be deleted clearly.

From now on, I will tell you why it is good tool for writing activity, and practical  classroom activities designed with this tool.

First, making students' autobiographies can be good activity with Storybird. With "Long Book" form, you can make them write their own stories about themselves and their life from birth to now. This activity will be good for any level or grade of students, but especially I recommend you to use this activity for Low level or low grade students don't have to write complex or long stories but they can write just simple and short diary style story. Above all, their less writing competencies and less knowledge of words and structures of English can be compensated by using those artworks. Low level students don't have to feel intimidated by lack of writing skills. They can create high quality autographies filled with those illustrations instead of long and complex sentences.

Second, you can use this tool for collaborative writing. Look at the "picture book" form. Teacher create first page, any theme can be used, but I think it would be better to make one that can spur students' inspiration and imagination. Then each students are responsible to make next page of previous story that their friends created. Simply, they publish serially their stories. When every students finished their work, you can make real book to read together. This book can be shared with other class students, teachers, or their parents. This activity can also be used for low level or grade students, and the reason is same with above activity I explained.