Story Bird Website Evaluation: Inspiring Students to Created Online Stories

Website Evaluation # 1

Website Title: Story Bird

Website URL: http://storybird.com

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.