Activity 3: Storybird

I think Storybird is very user friendly.  It's the basic "drag-and-drop" format.  You just add text for your story on the right/left or bottom/top depending on the illustration you choose.  The program doesn't give you many choices for fonts or layouts.  Although, maybe that's a good thing for me. :)  Perhaps if you choose the membership with a fee, you get more choices.  I didn't explore that piece.  Finding the graphics to match a story in my head was challenging.  I had some different ideas for a story when I looked at one illustration in the group of pictures... problem was, there wasn't always an illustration to match my thinking.  I had to poke around a bit to find a whole bunch of graphics to go together, that also matched my thinking!

A side note: I did look at ZooBurst.  I liked the "pop-up" format.  I thought that was cool.  I didn't like the graphics.  I took a look at other books (ones that others made using ZooBurst).  To me, it didn't look like all the graphics matched.  I looked at a book that someone made about a trip to New Orleans.  The author had cartoon illustrations, mixed with real-life photos, mixed with random cartoon backgrounds here and there.  I didn't think it flowed well.  

I think this would be a really fun project for kids to do... discussing parts of a story (character, setting, problem, solution), using descriptive writing, connecting thoughts.  It would take some work and time, but I think the kids would think it was pretty cool once they had a published story online :)

The story I wrote is about animals that go on a trip to visit different habitats.  I'm not sure that it specifically relates to what I teach about habitats... so, I don't know that I'd use it for an intro to habitats.  Maybe I'd use it more for how to write a story or maybe just an intro for how to use Storybird!  In any case, I like how it turned out! 

Here you go!  Hope you enjoy :)