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Collaborative storytelling in
kindergarten with the Wixie app |
I recently experimented with two things: my homemade portable sound booth and importing student pages to create a single, multimedia story using
Wixie, a cloud-based drawing tool. You've got to love a job where you can take a chance on the belief that the rewards will far outweigh the risks in attempting a new technique or approach to teaching. That was the case in Ms. Theall's kindergarten class, which wrote the story of Little Bear and his search for his dancing pants. It was an idea planted by visiting storyteller,
Jonathan Kruk.
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Portable sound booth made with
canvas storage box and acoustic foam |
The students each wrote a line of the story and then drew a picture of this sentence using Wixie on their iPad. That's when I broke out the new recording booth. Each student then came to me and placed their iPad in the sound booth, which was basically a 12x12 canvas storage container from Home Goods, padded with acoustic rubber foam. It does not make the recordings "sound proof," but it can block out a great deal of ambient classroom noise. And that's a good thing if you want a recording that limits the distraction of background noise.
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Import drawings from different
accounts into one Wixie project |
Once all the stories were recorded, I used Wixie's import tool. This allows the teacher to look at the Wixie files of each student in class and import the precise page needed into a new project. It makes the construction of a collaboratively authored multimedia story very simple. Take a look at
our story. You'll need this public access key-- cpj65d.
