Fictional Stories in all Their Glories!

We've recently transitioned our writing from Personal Narratives to Fictional Stories containing a beginning, middle and end.  The transition has proven a bit difficult as the Kinders love to continue to write about what is near and dear...moms, flowers, and butterflies!

This little guy took to the transition well and worked very hard on his story!  We've chosen to do the story in three parts as it supports the way we have been visualizing and completing these stories in class.  If I can figure out how to put them together into one file, I will!

My Digital Story--Take 1

Here's a draft of my digital story.  I started it in Movie Maker on Windows Live, which had some features I really enjoyed (like the ability to include video clips), but ran into a lot of trouble with the narration.  So I redid it on Photostory, which was much more user friendly.  This is set to private on YouTube, so I'm sorry if you can't view it.  I'll have to look at how to add people to share with!

Does vimeo count as 2.0?

Our first digital story!

We have recently moved to fictional stories including a beginning, middle and end.  Check back to see the progress of our fictional stories.  We have a few close to completion!

Kindergarten Digital Story

Students Using Digital Storytelling

While the uses of Digital Storytelling in the Kindergarten classroom came quickly to mind, it was another tool that seemed to stay in the theory part of my brain and not into the practice.  This tool could be invaluable to Kindergarten students as so many of them have so much more to say than they are able to write at this point in their learning.  To be able to give a five year old a microphone and allow them to dictate their stories instead of struggle with writing, it would open a world creativity and ease for them!
But I am/was still struggling with the down and dirty: how it worked, how students could make it work in the computer lab, etc.  However, while I was researching more about it, I found this site that brought this pretty close to practice for me with links to teacher resources, graphic sources, music sources, sound effect sources, as well as examples of completed storyboards.  Once I saw the completed storyboards it all became more clear.  Now I am hunting for the right programs that Kindergarten students would be able to use to create their own stories.
Here's the site.  Keep scrolling down, it gets better and better!

Digital Storytelling

The Impending Snow Day video reminded me of this gem.  These kids are brilliant and have brought digital storytelling to a new and argumentative level.