Storybird

I’d like to introduce a web 2.0 tool that can be used to foster collaborative writing among learners of English as a foreign language. It is storybird. Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print. Story bird creates a virtual collaborative learning environment between teachers and students and also between students and students.

 

As a teacher, it gives you a lot of benefits and privileges. Use can use a free Class account to manage students, create assignments, and build beautiful libraries. You can invite and ‘uninvite’ students to the site, you can send emails or comments to all or any particular student, you can give students assignments and set the submission dates. Once students login to their accounts they see the assignments immediately and a link that tells them to start doing the assignment. As teacher, once you click on any assignment you see all the tasks that students have submitted so far. You can make the stories available to the general public or you can restrict the access to only the members of the class. It has many other benefits.

                    

It also has a lot of benefits for students. It stimulates creativity and imagination. Students can create stories in minutes and enjoy them for life. They can eventually publish their stories, sell their art, connect with fans, maintain bonds and share traditions. A student can invite another student to collaborate with him or her in the same task. There are so many images to inspire them to start writing. They receive alerts by email and, thanks to the interactive nature of this tool, they can see the work done by other students and make comments on them. For the above mentioned reason and many more, I think that this tool could be used to inspire and facilitate collaborative writing and publishing among students and I also believe that it is nice way to teach students to start using modern tools of e-learning between students and teachers, so that when they eventually come to the university they would be very familiar with tools such as virtual campuses, online programmes etc.

Here is a little example of a class account under construction. Thanks for finding time to read this.