Storybird can be accessed at http://storybird.com/. This is a wonderful free creative writing site where you can create your own stories using interesting and beautiful images provided by a variety of illustrators. These can be summarised as ‘short, art-inspired stories’ and they are great for writing collaboratively or for individual writing. Teachers can get a free account for each class with easy access which is a great timesaver. Users can share their stories by sending a URL via e-mail, or they can purchase them.

How to use in the classroom

*Excite the students about becoming a published author
*Explain that their work will be read by people all over the world

*Have the writings be completed before they publish to the web… if they already have a draft of a story. It becomes easier to chunk their sentences to import into different pages to represent the given art work.

Tutorials

Storybird demo.movie

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWrslLyuXk8 

Super Storytelling with StoryBird

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T00YjRBIcIw

An example of  a story

Examples of friendship, love and family in nature

Further Reading

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/storybird-new-teacher-boot-camp-lisa-dabbs

Do try Storybird with your class. It is a great way of encouraging reluctant writer to write and feel very proud of their achievements.