Fun with Webinars

Today I conducted a webinar with Sara Staten about "Storybird" (storybird.com)-- this is a terrific web 2.0 tool that helps students express their creativity through art and writing. The site has a number of thematically organized original art to choose from to inspire ideas for writing and sharing in a "round robin" fashion. Students can begin a story and email it to another to add to it until the story is complete. They can then publish their final book where it will remain saved in the website, and it's completely free, student-safe, and super fun and easy to use.

I was mostly impressed with the art available to select from on the website. It ranges from very cute and simple to more complex and thought-provoking. I enjoyed working with Sara on this presentation. I'm glad some folks signed up to participate today (thank you Jeff, Melanie, and Alison!!). The participants made some excellent comments and offered great feedback. I think the tool is most useful in an English classroom, but Melanie also pointed out its usefulness in a World Languages class as well.

I'm glad the technology didn't fail us during our presentation and am so grateful for having paired with an excellent partner like Sara!! She had great ideas for a lesson plan to match the tool and was instrumental in getting it all together in time. What a great experience this was. I'm excited to see if anyone's Web 2.0 article will be published next semester. Thanks to Jeff and Liz for creating this assignment. I think we all feared it a bit, especially at the tail end of the semester when we have so many other assignments due, but once we tried it we realized how fun it actually was. I'll be using this tool when I teach next semester!