Storehouse - cool app for story telling on iOS

According to the iTunes tag, Storehouse is ...

Share your world through Storehouse. It’s the easiest way to create and discover beautiful stories.
Combine photos, videos, and text to meaningfully document your experiences. Publish your stories for friends and followers, or share them by email, Facebook, or Twitter. Explore stories created by your friends and our community of storytellers from all around the world.
BUILT FOR MOBILE
Storehouse was designed for mobile, from the intuitive touch-based interface to the way we allow you to create and share on-the-go.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVITY
We’ve made laying out photos, videos, and text so easy that anybody can create beautiful stories. Easily add photos and videos from your iPad Camera Roll, Dropbox, Flickr, and Instagram. You don’t need to be a designer to put together something stunning.
SHARE YOUR STORIES ANYWHERE
Stories look great on all screen sizes so you can rest easy knowing that you can share them with anyone.
DISCOVER STORIES FROM AROUND THE WORLD
Get inspired by exploring stories created by our global community. Instantly travel the world, learn a new skill, or discover interesting places and people, all from your iPad.

Here's their promo video.

It appears that Storehouse has just won an Apple design award in the past week or two as well. So, I gave it a try.

Firstly, the interface is clean and that usually makes for a simple app. And it pretty much is. The only issue I had was trying to find the embed link ... finally found it on the web view on my laptop - on your iPad is simply gives you the option to open in Safari, but the once there you can get the embed code for your website or blog. IMHO they should have this as an option on the final "publish" page too.

Anyway - here's my simple Storehouse just taken from some random pics from my camera roll. Embedded of course! This app could be used for any story that has plenty of visuals and short video. 

What happens when you let 13 year old students take control of their own learning?

Been thinking of how to write this post for a while ... and have decided to just let the student work speak for itself.
What follows are some examples of student work from a group of 13 year old girls who have were challenged to do something that they would be proud of ... something that they could show their parents and teachers that what they had done was of value to both them and to others as well.
First up is a website that a couple of girls put together for our Social Sciences faculty in an attempt to revamp their resources for teaching a unit to Year 8 students on biosecurity. These girls actually placed 3rd in the TVNZ Netguide Web Challenge last year.


Another student created a website on the holocaust, inspired by her religious studies teacher.

This student has a sporting outlook on life - so she set herself a goal of developing a website that looks at sports for the 2012 London olympics.

If you have a good look at all of these sites, you'll see the quality of the work these girls have put in. Add to this the fact that they had to research the various tools (eg Weebly, Google sites, Wix, Yola etc) to find the one that gave them the result that they were looking for. In most cases that meant that first choices of web building tool was not the one that made the cut ... often girls found that the site they had chosen didn't give them the outcome they wanted and they had to go back and rethink their choices. Add to this that they had to find the tools themselves ... little or no direction came from me ... the "guide" said "you know what the task is ... you find the tool to suit".

Another project these students were asked to do was to tell a digital story using Scratch software ... so there was some restriction here ... they had to use Scratch (it was a programming module after all), but the students had free range of the story they wanted to tell - the only requirement again was that they needed to be proud of their work. To be honest, many of the students produced outstanding work, but I chose this one to show here ... the sound is poor (haven't worked out why), but the student who created this had never used Scratch before and her story was a well known Maori legend ... enjoy it

 

 Ultimately, the girls all reported that they had learned a lot and enjoyed the freedom of choice of project. The quality of work speaks volumes for the spirit in which the girls approached these projects. I hope you enjoy them.

Livebinders - another cool sharing tool for the classroom

I have been meaning to give Livebinders a serious work out for some time, and took the opportunity last night to rearrange a pile of stuff I've been wanting to share with staff at our school for some time, but hadn't found the tool to quite do it.

Here's my problem ... like most of us, I read a lot, usually reading my RSS feeds via Feedler Pro on my iPad. When there is something I want to keep or share with someone else I made the decision I didn't just want to email the link to others - I wanted a way to share with others the rich 'original experience' of the original item. So, I started looking for a tool that could collect all of the items I wanted to keep. I'd been an EverNote user for a while, so decided to try this - and it works well for collecting all of the articles.
The next problem was what to do with all of the articles ... by default they all end up in the same EverNote notebook - so last night I rearranged, merged, tagged items and also created a series of notebooks for the major topics I'm interested in. Then by dragging and dropping the "notes" into the right notebook I have a series of notebooks that can be shared with anyone.

The last piece of the puzzle is to use LiveBinders to present the entire set of notebooks to my audience. The process is simple - head to LiveBinders, create a free account and start creating a digital ring binder with as many tabs as you like - you can put all sorts of content into a tab.
Here's a short video from the Livebinder web site.

For my first its as simple as adding the shared URLof my Evernote notebooks.

So, give Livebinders a try ... they are easy to set up, and very easy to add content to. I can see these being very efficient ways of creating digital textbooks for students, and for students to create digital artifacts.