For my last
cool tool review, I used a storytelling tool. I used the iOS app, Little Story Maker, to make a short “book.”
The app is free to download from the App Store, and as far as I know there are
no in app purchases. You don’t need to make an account, just download
the app.
To showcase
the app, I made a book about my boyfriend and I’s trip to Walt Disney World in
May of 2015. To be reflected upon later, you are unable to save your book to
your phone, so I took screenshots of every page I made and turned it into a
Power Point that I saved as a video so I could upload it to this blog post.
This tool
makes books. You can choose to add a new story.
You then give your book a
title, a cover, and choose a layout.
The title is limited to so many
characters, I tried to add May 2015 to the end of my title and it would not
fit. The cover must be a square. Then you go page by page, adding photos and
texts. The text on the pages is also limited. There is no option to save the book, you can
only view it in app.
I personally believe this app does its
job kind of poorly. It does work, but I think it could be done a lot better. It
could possibly be because I’m using an iPhone and not an iPad, but when I was
typing the text, I couldn’t see what I was typing, shown in the photo below.
I had to check my spelling
after I saved the text. You’ll notice some of the first letters aren’t
capitalized. I tried to go back to fix it, but I couldn’t highlight the word to
fix it without deleting everything, which I found to be very inconvenient.
If this app worked as it was intended
to, or I suppose to my possibly high standards, I would definitely be using it
in my future classroom. I could use it to create biographies of students, or we
could make a book about something we’re learning about in class, such as colors
or shapes. This could definitely be a technological component of TPACK. If we
were learning about shapes, they could take pictures of shapes to upload to the
class book about that shape.
I would use this tool because as we
learned last week, e-books in the classroom are simply awesome. You can see a full post about e-books here on this blog post of mine. They are a good
way to get students excited about something, and seemed to motivate them like
nothing else. Being published is huge for kids, even if it is just in a
classroom app seen by us. They could write a book on paper, then edit and “publish”
it with the app.
Students could easily use this app on
their own. All you do is tap the screen to add pictures, then type your
captions, nothing too complicated. It is very self-explanatory, and was the
first cool tool I didn’t have to look up anything about to use. There is a help
page in the settings, and while reviewing it after finishing my story there are
some features I wasn’t aware of while working on my book. The only issue I
could see arising is students having trouble typing on the screen. I did get a
little frustrated myself while using it, because the app can only be used
sideways, and that’s not how I ever use my phone, making it a little difficult
for me.
This is a pretty decent app, just not
one I would choose to use further. It does, however, does what it is advertised
to do.
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