Publishing Guides & Tools

10 Digital Storytelling Projects

Richard Byrne has compiled this free eBook as an inspiration and guide to teachers. Ten teachers talk about their and their students experiences, everything from Keeping History Alive and The Haiku Project to Animal Poems and Digital Storytelling with Wordless Books. Includes sections on free tools and copyright / fair use issues.

How To Create A Digital Story

Nicole Kaffel has assembled an easy to follow step-by-step guide that will guide your students through the digital storytelling process. You may use different software, but the steps are universal.

• Define, Collect, Decide
• Select, Import, Create
• Decide, Write, Record, Finalize
• Demonstrate, Evaluate, Replicate

Using the web for high school student-writers

Ted Nellen talks about using the web for high school student-writers, and includes links to the syllabus he uses. His philosophy is "we learn by doing".

Ted's classes "include all of the elements of any other junior level English class, except they work exclusively on the Internet." This high school junior year English course is titled Cyber English.

Teachers and Writers Collaborative

The Teachers and Writers Collaborative predates the era of Web publishing. Based in NYC, it sponsors in-residence workshops. While not necessarily pertinent to the virtual world, the Collaborative has recently prepared materials for teaching writing to both special education and bilingual students. Since such resources are scarce, this link can help you reach these students.

Diagrams.net

To include flowcharts, graphs and other visual representations use Diagrams.net. It is free, open source software that can be used on-line (or downloaded onto your computer). It can create anything from traditional flowcharts to Venn diagrams, tables, and pretty much any type of chart you can think of. There's a a paid version if you would like to support the project, but it's not required.

Have students create an interactive story using a flowchart or create a poster explaining concepts that have learned in class.

Digital Storytelling Resources

Kathy Schrock has assembled an extensive list of additional resources if you want to delve into this topic further.

Identifont

Nothing is more frustrating than seeing the perfect font for an article or headline, and then not being able to identify it.

This site uses a series of questions to help you identify the font. You can use it to match some example text or search for that perfect font.

WhatTheFont

WhatTheFont is another site to help you identify the font's name. If you have an image of the font, you can upload it and WHatTheFont will try to match identify it.

Google Fonts

Nothing is worse than finding that perfect font, then finding out that it cannot be licensed or the costs are prohibitive.

Google has indexed over 800 open source and public domain fonts that can be used for both print and web sites at no cost. Use the Categories area to narrow down your font choices.

Do a Google search if you know the name of the font: Google Font like [name of font]