My Take
Overall, StoryKit is a good app for creating and reading social stories to students with disabilities. What I like about the app is that my students are able to be part of their own social story from beginning to end, including narrating the story. My students would help create paper social stories but they became not as interested. Now that I use Storykit, they are more willing to help with their own social story. The ability to use the camera on the ipad and import those pictures into the story is great. Another aspect I like is that the teacher or the student can narrate the story and play it back. This is a great feature for the struggling readers in my classroom. As the year goes on, my struggling readers grow tired of listening to staff go over social stories with them, however, when I allow them to narrate their own story, they seem to be more invested. The biggest problem I have is the size of the on screen keyboard. My students are 16-21 and sometimes the onscreen keyboard can be difficult for them to use.
How I Use It
I use Storykit for small groups and for individual students. Each week, we pick a skill to help the students when they are on a job site and/or in the community. As a class, we come up with the skill steps and break up into small group. Each group picks a skill step and models the step while another group member uses the camera app to take a picture of the skill step. These are the pictures that will be used in the social story. During the next small group we take turns typing and narrating the story so by the end of the week, we have an entire social story for that skill. Then before we go out into a job site and/or the community we use the Apple TV to listen to the social story as a reminder to use the skill. When using the app for individual students, we take pictures of the student’s environment and screen shots from Google to use as pictures for the story. The biggest issue I run into is that we don’t have 1:1 ipads so there isn’t always one around when working with an individual student so I usually use the app in a group setting.