#Octshowntell #3 Storybird

As Storybird was one of the sites that I played around with today I thought that it was probably useful to do something with it before I forgot. I really think it is unlikely that I would use this site for work or play again but you never know. It is probably quite useful for a children's librarian or a school librarian and would certainly be useful for kids to learn storytelling skills.

Telling stories is not my forte but I created a short one about my cat Polyxena and her names, called the Story of Polyxena. There are informational videos and it is quite easy to choose a theme or art work to use. The facility to embed it in a blog was supposedly available and weirdly I discovered it seemed to be an option with other stories I read on Storybird. Just not mine! I will be interested to see if others get the option when they link through.

PS This morning when I was on a different computer that didn't recognize me on Storybird I managed to get the code to embed the story. Fingers crossed that this works!

The Story of Polyxena on Storybird

#Octshowntell #2 Voki

I am trying to get up to speed here! I have done my Animoto and I uploaded a couple of Animoto shows to Youtube - a first for me. I have played around with a couple of the other suggested sites but then came across Miss Sophie Mac's Voki and decided to have a go at that. I wasn't particularly creative with it as I just used text to speech and the provided backgrounds. But I had definitely had FUNN playing round and can certainly see it as an eye- and ear- catching thing to put on our library blogs.

The only problem really is that it looks like it hasn't embedded in the blog while doing Preview but then when it is published it is there! You can embed your voki in three sizes: small, medium and large. I have done a medium and a large here.




Get a Voki now!

#Octshowntell Animoto Shanghai April 2010

I am finally getting my first #Octshowntell posted! I decided that I wanted to do an Animoto of my trip to Shanghai in April this year. Despite my having used Animoto before it ended up taking absolutely ages to do as I uploaded my Shanghai photos from Flickr. That was fine except that I had to upload the whole folder and then gradually delete them until I had about 12 photos for the clip. Maybe a lesson forthe future is to upload directly from my own drive. Nonetheless I am happy with the clip and think that using Animoto for travel shots is a great use. I am also glad I have finally got on with this task!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

#Octshowntell

The Flexible Understanding Now Network (FUNN) has set us a new challenge for October, that of telling a story using visuals (show) and audio (tell). Ruth's blogpost gives lots of interesting reading and possibilities of sites to use. We are supposed to do four stories over the month of October and I am behind with the task already.

Last weekend I played around with one of the tools I had used before, Animoto, and rediscovered some short video clips I did a couple of years ago. I enjoyed viewing them and posting them to Twitter. I also realized sadly that though a couple had been posted to this blog others were on a now defunct ning network. So before I go any further with this October task I am going to post them here!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Ruth has suggested a number of tools we can use and I have listed them below. I will be trying to explore and use a few over the coming weeks. But as I am currently in arrears I had better get on with creating something! It will also a good learning for me to upload to my Youtube account as I have never done so before.

Here are some digital storytelling tools which I'll try to explore for a start: Storybird, animoto, xtranormal, glogster, voicethread, animasher, makebelievecomics, vuvox, prezi.