Community reviews for Storybird

This was a fun tool to use with poetry writing. The illustrations provided are amazing. It was easy to use for my students (2nd and 3rd graders), although it took me a little while to figure out how to use the site.

This is a unique take on digital writing. Students have a wealth of images to choose from when designing their short digital stories. The artwork is beautiful, engaging and sorted by categories to help eliminate the amount of time some students might take to choose which image(s) they want.

Storybird can be used across grade levels and subject areas. What a great way to teach students how to combine image and text to tell a story, to create content. or to learn how to storyboard a story.

Students LOVED writing their own stories & really getting creative. As a teacher for almost 500 students, my one negative is that you have to pay to have more than one class, makes management hard

Storybird can be an amazing tool for classroom teachers. It allows for student creativity and can also enhance basic writing and story telling skills.

Storybird is a fun website that encourages literacy, creativity, and global collaboration. Students will enjoy the creative potential with this tool and the ability to see and comment on the works of students from around the world. As a teacher, you can create a class and then set up writing assignments with a prompt, a ready made storybird, or your own image for students to work from. You can create due dates and have a class discussion forum and with the pro account leave feedback and grade students on their projects. This would be excellent tool as a writing workshop activity in middle school or an early literacy project with elementary students.

Storybird is an online story building tool in which students select a bank of artwork and create a story by dragging the artwork to pages and adding text. The resulting story can be emailed to others, embedded in a web page, or professionally printed in a book for a fee. The paid Pro Educator version also allows you to download one book per student as a PDF. Storybird has worked hard to make a teacher friendly free version their tool. Teachers can have up to 75 students, they can make assignments, they can assign grades and make comments on stories in progress, and student stories are automatically private and not part of the public stories that can be viewed on the site. You create a story by selecting a collection of artwork by artist or by tags (flowers, boys, action, etc.). The teacher can make a selection for students or the students can select the artwork for themselves. The art is arrayed as little thumbnails around a workspace where you drag on the picture you want, adjust its location on the page, and add text. A filmstrip of your pages is at the bottom of the screen that allows you to click on and edit your work. The help menu is hidden in the "You" drop down menu and a little tricky to access. There are a wide range of pictures and topics to choose from making this a very versatile storytelling tool. At this time, you cannot upload your own artwork. I like how the collection of artwork is somewhat limited by your initial choice so that students must focus on the story rather than endlessly searching for artwork.