Digital Stories on the iPad

Yesterday I had the chance to work with our thrid grade students as they created a digital story about bats on their iPads. We used the app StoryKit to create our book and also used the FotoFarm app to find pictures. The students were able to spread out around the room and hallway as they used the iPads. Research on bats had been done prior to this time so that they were ready to create their stories. All students were happily engaged in creating a book about bats!

The Storykit app allows you to write text, draw pictures, add saved photographs and record your voice, all of which can be moved around the page in an endless number of combinations. The students had not used this app before, but were very quick in figuring it out and troubleshooting it. The only big problem we had was that some students created a new book instead of a new page when they were done with their first page, and we were not able to combine books so they had to start their pages over. Not once were they upset about losing their pages, instead they took it in stride and created a new one. In addition to being completely engaged in their task, I saw an endless variety of books - no two were the same.