Tweet Tweet....No It's Not Twitter!

Twitter isn't the only thing that "tweets" on the internet. Today I discovered and played around with a fun collaborative storytelling site called StoryBird. www.storybird.com.

StoryBird promotes and facilitates collaborative storytelling. Back in the day when I taught third grade, every Friday we worked on collaborative storytelling. I provided a prompt (either a picture or story starter) then every student wrote one sentence on their paper. Papers were passed to the left and the next student added a sentence after reading what had been written. The process continued for 10 or more passes depending on the time of year. In the end, the collaborative story was returned to the orginator for editing. StoryBird takes my primative collaborative storytelling lesson and brings it to the 21st Century. Students (and even adults) have fun creating a story together - all the while practicing and reinforcing sequencing, inferencing, writing, critical thinking and much more.

Teachers can easily sign up for a free account and create a class within StoryBird. Once you've done that, StoryBird helps by prompting students when it's their turn to add to the story. You can partner students to collaborate on a story, do a whole class collaboration, or even model writing and storytelling using your Mobi. The opportunities are only limited by your imagination.

When I taught my rudimentary collaborative storytelling lesson, we ended each session by sharing our stories and providing feedback. StoryBird capitalizes on this need to share and get feedback. Created stories are posted and anyone who reads the story can provide a critique and feedback. What a wonderful strategy for sharing collaborative writing with parents and for helping students share feedback with each other.

Though StoryBird is a great internet find, the lesson I learned from discovering StoryBird is more powerful than any classroom activity. The lesson is that 21st Century Teaching doesn't mean abandoning lessons and strategies that we love and are proven effective. 21st Century Teaching means taking what's effective and repackaging it through the use of technology. The activities the students completed in my classroom in the 80's are the same as the activities completed by StoryBird classrooms. The goals are the same, the outcomes are the same...the only difference is that through technology we better capitalize on the needs of 21st Century learners.

Check out StoryBird....it's appropriate and fun for all ages.