Website Evaluation # 1
Website Title: Story Bird
Grade/Age/ Proficiency Level: K-Adult/ Beginner to Advance
Content and Purpose
Storybird is designed to promote creative writing by using poetry, picture books, and
longform books. Students are encouraged to share their writing and read others works
too. This website allows students to create their own stories using the tools provided.
The students are assigned a username and a password. They log into their account and
there are tabs at the top that take them to the different tasks they wish to do. Creating
and reading stories or poems are the two main student tasks.
Effectiveness of External Documents
There are informative videos included to instruct teachers on how to use the website with their students. There are also interesting blog posts with articles and ideas for the teacher. I like that each month Storybird posts a writing challenge on their blog attached to the site. Instructions and rules are given for the monthly challenge. In order to protect students' privacy, their accounts don't allow them to submit a story for the challenge. However, the teacher could have her class complete the monthly writing project amongst themselves. Besides the blog entries, help videos and articles, there are no other external documents given. There are no documents provided to assist teachers with developing writing projects with their students.
Appeal
The website inspires and captivates writers through its artwork. Students have the ability to select various pictures to make a picture book, chapter book or poem. The site is also interactive as students are given the power to become authors by formulating words to accompany their chosen pictures. Students can also interact with others by collaborating on writing stories, sharing completed stories, and reading the stories of others. The site includes a place for students to commenting on the books they read. Also, the teacher can turn on a fundraising feature that allows parents to purchase their child's books. Thus, allowing the students to see their work in print and keep these books as treasures for years to come.
Language Goals
Storybird allows students to improve their writing and reading skills. Teachers are able to use this site to promote the creation of different writing genres. For example, students can use the poetry feature to create a poem, the picture book to create narrative stories, or the longform book to write a personal essay or more detail chapter book. Teachers can also have students write picture books for different purposes. Each different book could focus on different writing traits such as word choice, characterization, organization, conventions, etc.
The teacher can scaffold the writing for individual English abilities. For beginners, they can write naming stories that simply have words of things from the picture or they could make ABC books with a picture and word for every letter of the alphabet. They could also make a book of opposites. For students a little more advance but needing more support a basic sentence pattern can be used with students adding their own ending. These repetitive books also help beginner readers. For more intermediate students they can create their own sentences to demonstrate their use of grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation. They could make an animal book or a story about friends with simple sentences. Advanced students can write picture books about how to solve a simple problem, or write chapter books.
Storybird can improve students reading skills as they read other writers books. There is a tab just for reading where students can find read books or poems, follow authors and like the books or poems they read. Reading other Storybird books will help develop their vocabulary, modeled conventions, and give them examples of figurative language. Reading comprehension will be developed as they make meaning from others stories. The teacher can have students orally share about different books they have read on Storybird to check for reading comprehension while practicing students' speaking skills.
Assessability
The teacher can create an account where she can add her students without giving their full names or email addresses. Then she can manage their accounts for her class by changing their passwords, seeing when they last logged in, and reviewing their work. She can create assignments for the students to complete. When making an assignment, she adds a description of it, the date it is due, and a graphic to represent the assignment. When an assignment is submitted the teacher can assess it, assign a letter or number grade to it, give it a sticker/reward, and write personal notes. Apart from the grade and reward the teacher can give the students feedback by writing comments about their work. Students can also give other students in their class written feedback by writing comments. There is a feature that allows the teacher to monitor the comments and make the necessary changes.
Usability
For the most part, this website is easy to use. At the top of the student page, there are
three clearly labeled tabs. One page called “Your Stuff”, stores and organizes all the
students work, class assignments, books to be read, and liked pages. Another tab,
“Create” takes you to the page where you can start creating a story. Creating a piece is a
simple process that starts with selecting your artwork. The artwork serves as the
inspiration for the story or poem. Next the writer selects the type of writing from three
choices: poem, picture book, and longform. Then the writer is taken to a screen to
compose their story.When they have finish they save and exit. The last step is to finalize
the books details. In this final step, the author has the choice to keep it unpublished to
finish later or to publish it. Once that is completed the reader is taken back to the "Your
Stuff" page. The third and final tab is called "Read". This page makes it easy for students
to read published books and like ones of his or her choosing.
The teacher's account has two additional tabs. It has a "Studio" page for creating,
assessing assignments, and managing student accounts. The other additional tab is a
"Shop" page that has different prices for purchasing student created books. The only
difficult part of this website is finding specific information. For example, the site
advertises that it is aligned with the common core standards. However, there is not a page
listing which common core standard are met from using this tool. In fact, this
information is buried away in an old post.
Strengths and Improvements
The artwork is visually appealing and inspiring. The pictures allow for a variety of texts
to be created using the same picture due to its complexity. This website serves as a
versatile tool that allows educators flexibility in designing their lessons. There are so
many ways these three basic formats (poetry, picture books, and longform books) can be
used to teach different skills. In addition, the site is user-friendly and allows for a
variation of difficulty in the types of projects. Simple pieces like poetry can be produced
fairly quickly, whereas, longform (chapter books) will require more time. The
projects also allow for collaboration amongst students in writing them. Overall, the
website does a great job of protecting the identity of students so to ensure their
safety. The biggest advantage to using this creative tool is that all these features are
free to users. There are some add-on features like printing costs but the major tools do
not cost! Storybird is a wonderful resource that we should take advantage of and use
with our students.
However, there are three major improvements I would make to this website. One is to
allow students to upload their own artwork and then use it in their stories. This feature
would give students more ownership over the finaly product. It would also make the book
completely original as no one else will have the same artwork. Providing students
with the option to use their own pictures would eliminate the frustration that might occur
with trying to make a story from premade pictures that don't exactly match the idea you
wanted to convey.
The second improvement would be to add two options to the poetry feature. These
options would allow you to type your own words and save words from previous screens
before reshuffling to use in your poem. Therefore, you are able to express exactly what
you want. In addition, the type your own words option would allow students to create
different forms of poetry.
Thirdly, I would increase collaboration between teachers. This website encourages student
writers to collaborate and give each other feedback but it doesn't provide any opportunity
for teachers to do so. I would add a tab with a page for teachers to share how they have
used Storybird in their classroom. On this page teachers can share writing lessons plans
and other ideas for how to use Storybird to improve students literacy skills.
