Digital Stories

I think students should be exposed to various ways to publish their writing. One of my favorite ways to do this is with digital stories. I know there are many programs out there to accomplish this, but we use Pixie. I have the students write an outline of what they plan to write on their different slides. I open the number of slides they need and name them all, so all they have to do when they are done with one slide is hit the "save" button and click on the next.

I encourage them to use text and an illustration on each page-but what they make is completely up to them. They record the narration and then choose a background music and they are done--we have a little movie. This time we did an activity where they are writing from the perspective of an author; what kinds of books would they write, what message would they want to convey? I like it because I can see what authors that we have studied have influenced them and how. I'm going to invite the parents so we can do a Movie Festival.

Here are just a few examples.