Creative writing - 5 card Flickr

Anyone come across this before? 5 photos chosen from a set generated at random from Flickr. Create a short storty based on the choices.

Storybird

Storybird provides a selection of great images to choose from and is very easy to use.

Sign in, choose an artist by taking a look at the styles available and write!

I had a go at making a short poem and found it great fun. It is a great finale for children's story or poetry writing and can be published online too.

I can see myself using this with my class back in Spain. Loved it!

Which path, little princess?

'Novlet' collaborative non-linear storywriting

I just had a go on one of the Web 2.0 tools called 'Novlet' which I think would appeal both young and adult learners. This website allows you to write your own story of any genre by writing a passage consisting of 2~3 paragraphs and anyone who is keen on keeping it going can simply add a bit of story to it. Also, you can just browse numerous stories written by other users.
I think this website can encourage a learner to try writing stories of different genres and moreover generate ideas to write about inspired by previous writers. In addition, the fact that anyone out there can be a potential audience will remind the learner to think about the accuracy of the writing.
I am not sure if this tool can be implemented directly in the classroom as it seems not possible to alow only a certain group of people to have an access to editing the story as co-authors. If not, it will be hard to have a complete piece of work done by learners only.

Zooburst

To start us off, I had a look at Zooburst.

It allows you to create an online 'popup book' using text and pictures. Very easy to use; you can use pictures from the cliparts provided or upload your own. I was thinking maybe you could give learners a set of pictures to work from and create their own story ie an interpretive story or give them scope to search for their own but you can waste a lot of time there. You can really manipulate the pictures much on screen so not much scope for very sophisticated graphics:-)

The text for each page of the book probably needs to be quite short but at higher levels the challenges could be to write a pithy story in 6 lines for example.

The books can be embedded as I've done here in a post, in a blog or your wiki.

Here is my rather uninspired (visually) attempt to produce a popup story of the carpetfitter and the canary:-)

A great site for writing with YLs

Me again,

Just came across this via twitter (it's great, join in!). It's a fantastic site.

Have a watch of Russell Stannard's (web legend) intro video here.

This is Russell site, it's well worth a visit: Teacher Training Videos

Online writing tools

Created with http://www.fodey.com/generators/newspaper/snippet.asp

There are so many online tools now that you could spend hours playing and then deciding it's not for you. We might look at some key attributes to help us make decisions about what might be appropriate for what we want to do. Web 2.0 tools all share the attribute of being, usually freely, available and usable online ( some tools of course still require physical installation to your local computer). For those that 'run' online, one distinguishing characteristic seems to be how flexible they are in allowing you to download content for local use (eg the Vokis) or whether you leave content on a web server somewhere and you link to this (eg Youtube).

As you can see this tool allows online text generation, which is then downloaded as an image, which I was easily able to embed in this posting so this could be added to a class writing blog. You'll see there are different formats for the output, though I'm not sure about all of these - the newspaper clipping seemed to have some potential.

But this does make me think about the role these tools in stages of writing development - many seem to relate to 'publishing' (not to be minimised in terms of motivational power and establishing a sense of audience) but  not to facilitating processes associated with drafting and revising. Any thoughts?

Writeboard

Hi all

This is a collaborative writing tool - another example of social software applications.

I set a text up here
http://123.writeboard.com/1c4e26d555cf2f47d/v/new

login educ7006
p/word manchester1

Check my text, correct anything, add or make changes to make it more readable or more advanced:-)
Then see how you can track these changes.

Any potentials here?

See also Nik Peachey's trial wiki space on Cinderella at http://cinderella-their-story.wetpaint.com/page/The+Cinderella+Story

I really like this creative writing idea that could easily be adapted for online collaborative writing activities. Nik invites you to join in an experiment too.

BW
Diane