Resources
While preparing for this project, I collected and presented a lot of resources both to the classroom teacher and her students. I have compiled those resources, and some additional, here to make starting your own project simpler. I am a believer in using FREE online tools and a huge fan of anything that integrates with our district's use of Google Apps for Education.
General Resources
As each student project grows sometimes there is an issue with large files. You might find it necessary to compress files to make them work with the other online tools. We used smallpdf and it worked simply and has a lot of options.
Story Illustrations
Students had the options of creating original hand-drawn or digital illustrations. Most of the students chose to use the free online tool StoryboardThat. This tool had many positives for ease of use during our project:
- 2 free storyboards, up to 6 cells, a week
- uses Google sign-in
- finished storyboards are shareable by URL or embeddable HTML
- storyboards can be downloaded as PDFs through the printing process which can then be manipulated or combined further in Google Docs
- storyboards can also be turned into a slide show or foldable card
Digital Book Tools
Students had a choice of three digital publishing tools. They choose what they thought would be best for the look of their finished digital book. Each of the tools allows the digital book to be shared using a public URL. Page Flip-Flap requires an email to published the completed book since it's a "no account" tool the only record of the book is the URL received in an email. We had students that chose this tool use the classroom teachers email that way nothing was lost.