A few weeks back, my professor assigned a project to develop our own personal learning network (PLN). She suggested that we create a twitter account and follow prominent educational sources/people in the twitter world. Lets just say, I was less than enthused to develop a twitter account. I am not overly fond of this sort of social networking and up until this point, refused to sign up for an account. My displeasure quickly changed when I discovered that twitter is more than just “tweeting” about random nothings and can offer teachers great educational resources!
Richard Byrne, is someone I have been following on Twitter. I am convinced this man does nothing but search the Internet for useful educational resources and then posts them to the twitter world. While I was perusing my account one day, I noticed that he had tweeted about a neat source that allows children to create their own books. It seemed simple enough so I clicked on the link he provided. This is what I discovered:
1) Upon entering this website, I found it to be a little confusing. I did not realize that I had to look at the upper right hand corner for the “book” link. This link will actually take you to a different screen where you are able to create these books.
2) Once I finally figured out where to go, I found this section of the site to be extremely user friendly.
3) I liked that there were four pre-saved animals that the creator of the story could choose from (i.e., there was a penguin, gorilla, giraffe, and a creature I’m assuming is a pig)
4) Each of these animals had different “view” and/or “action” which I thought helped make the stories come to life.
5) I also liked the pre-saved backgrounds, however; I felt that the author of the story was very limited in what they were able to choose from. The main reason I liked the backgrounds was for the mere fact I thought it could help guide/push children into what they should write about. I sometimes feel like if a child is “stuck” sometimes the flow of a story line will emerge if the illustrations can be produced first.
6) I was not fond of the fact that only 2 lines of text would show on each page. The text box allows for more writing, however; only two lines would show up once you clicked off the box (i.e., also, you could not change the size of the font or the font box to allow for more room)
7) I liked the concept that children could create their own covers and that the stories could be printed out, e-mailed, or saved to the computer.
Overall, I truly enjoyed creating a book. I thought this would a perfect activity to use with the primary children (i.e, K-2) who were just learning how to write and create stories due to the fact that there was such a limited amount of room for text.
My twitter account!
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