30hands - From Flipped Learning to Digital Narrative

I’ve just been looking over the 30hands Pro app for the iPad.

30hands is a simple to use app and community for the development and sharing of instructional presentations and videos.

The app itself enables you to either upload an existing slide deck, video or images from your computer , Google Drive or Dropbox , or create your own slideshow within the app using the drawing tools within the application.

Once your slides have been created or added you can then record a narrative over each slide and also annotate the slides using the drawing features.

Once your slide sequence and recording is complete you have a number of options for sharing it. You can export it as a video, save it to either DropBox or Google Drive or add it to the 30hands community site.

The community site has a really wide collection of example presentations and you can either view these as individual slides with their recordings or watch them as video.

If you are a community member you can also download the videos and the project files and this will allow you to edit, adapt and build your own version of the presentation for your students.

Using 30hands with students

• This is a great tool to create flipped learning video content. There’s loads of variety in what you can do, from uploading and enhancing your existing presentations with audio and annotation to creating unique slides and integrating images and video.
• You can also use the app to create digital narrative using images from around the internet (Pixabay and Unsplash are two great places to find royalty free images) or you can use your mobile device to capture images and video and then add your own narrative voiceovers.
• This is also a great tool for capturing student project work and for enabling student to do project reports. They can just grab images or upload their work and then add a narrative voiceover explaining their learning outcomes.

30hands works as a native app on iOS or can run in the Chrome browser on other devices so it can also be used in the BYOD classroom.

This is a great tool to enable teachers to create materials or to put in the hands of students to help develop their digital literacies and make learning tangible with genuine outputs that they can collect into a digital portfolio.

• Check out the 30hands Community
• Download the 30hands Starter app ($1.99)
• Download the 30hand Pro app ($6.99)
• Check out 30hands in the Chrome browser
• Find out about whole school deals

I hope you enjoy using this app with your students.

My Books:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

Exploit Interactive Digital Narrative for Language Development

Draw a Stickman site has a collection of short narratives about a Stickman that you can draw with your mouse.

Once you have drawn the man you click a button and he comes to life.

You then follow him through a short adventure and draw in various elements as he needs them and discover what happens to him.

There are three free adventures that students can work through or you can use them in class with a data projector.

These are really imaginative adventures that can inspire students’ creativity.

Draw a Stickman can be used for lots of activities including retelling the story, writing the next chapter of the story or just predicting what will happen as the adventures unfold.

You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: http://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

Related links:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers 

 Best

Nik Peachey

Sutori for Collaboratively Creating Digital Narrative Timelines

Sutori is a wonderful tool for creating content rich interactive digital narrative.

The narrative time line is displayed in a vertical single webpage and students can just scroll down through the elements of the story.

Photo by Federica Campanaro on Unsplash

Stories can include a wide range of media including video, audio, text, and quiz type objects as well as forums. Once created they can be embedded into websites, blogs or shared through social media.
There are some wonderful examples and a specific section for teachers on the site.

Here are a few examples that I really liked:

• Aztec, Inca, Maya 
• Teacher's Guide to Starting Back to School
• The History of English 
• The History of Pink Floyd

Creating your own narrative is very easy. Just register and go to your dashboard. Then click the cross to add a story. You can then add a title and introduction  and start adding various interactive learning objects and media.

Once your narrative is started you can also invite others to collaborate and build the time line with you.

Once the narrative is complete you can share it or even print it as a PDF.

You can use Sutori to create interactive reading tasks for students, or better still get your students to use it to create their own project or research presentations or as task outputs as a means of assessing how much they have learned.

Sutori is a marvellous tool and free to use for teachers, but there are also premium subscription which offers learner tracking and management services, so if this is a popular tool in your school it could be worth supporting the company and investing in a subscription.

You can find over 100 digital lesson plans, videos and teacher resources in my Teachers' Classroom App

 

GET IT TODAY

Best
Nik Peachey

Collaborative Story Writing for the BYOD Classroom

TaleShip is a really interesting app for developing reading and writing skills in a collaborative and creative way.

Photo by Ari He on Unsplash

The app is based around a common classroom activity in which students write stories together by adding a sentence and passing it on to another writer. The next writer then adds a sentence and either passes it back or passes it to another student. The process continues until the story is finished.

In this app version users create an account and then write the introduction to the story. You can add links to images in the introduction phase too, so this can help inspire other writers. Once the introduction is create you can either make it public, share it through social media
or share it with selective people.

The app works both synchronously and asynchronously and has a text chat window on the side of the interface so students can interact with each other as they build the story.
The app works in the browser so it will run on a laptop or mobile device. This makes it particularly suitable for the BYOD classroom.

TaleShip is a great way to get students writing collaboratively and you can follow it up with some peer correction or get the students to take the stories and enhance and improve them by adding more description and detail.

Here is an example activity I created. Feel free to contribute to the story if you wish.
https://taleship.me/rooms/join/dark-stormy-night-62182317 


You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: http://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

My eBooks:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers

Best
Nik Peachey

Illustrate Poems & Create Short Image Based Narrative

Commaful is an interesting web based tool for combining text and images into beautifully visual short stories or poem.

 Once you have signed in you can start to create your narrative just by clicking on 'Create a Story' and typing in your text. You can them either search or choose from the images selected and combine the images with the text.

There are lots of artistic images, gifs and video clips to choose from and you can choose how to position the text over the images.

Once your narrative is complete it plays like a presentation that users can click through to read. You can also get a code to embed them into a web or blog page.

The app seems to be particularly popular with teens and there’s a lot of teen type fiction on the themes of romance and or horror stories. Some of the themes can be a bit strong so it’s best to use this only with more mature students.

The app is also social so users can comment on, follow and like each others creations.

I used the app to create an illustration of a poem by Robert Frost - Fire & Ice. This would be nice activity to do with students, either selecting or letting them select a poem to illustrate.

It would also be a nice way to illustrate and publish any short fiction writing that they produce.

You can also use the site to create your own reading comprehension texts or try to find something appropriate that’s already on the site.

Here are some nice examples:

• The Beginning
• Only to be Lost in History
• Spun up in a Web of Lies

I hope you find Commaful useful and create some great narrative with your students.

You can find links to many more tools like this and activities for the digital classroom in my ebooks at: http://peacheypublications.com/. All my ebooks are available for iOS and as PDF.

Sign up for my twice monthly free newsletter and get a free copy of Digital Tools for Teachers at: https://tinyletter.com/technogogy/ 

My eBooks:

• 20 Tech Enhanced Activities for the Language Classroom
• Digital Tools for Teachers
• Thinking Critically through Digital Media
• Exploiting Infographics
• 10 Lessons in Digital Literacy
• Digital Video – A Manual for Language Teachers

Best
Nik Peachey