Friday, September 2, 2011

Story Cubes

This week as part of our literacy rotations we used an app called story cubes. To use the app you need to shake the I-pod. When you shake the I-pod it rolls the dice on the screen. The dice on the screen have different pictures on them. Once we rolled the dice we used the pictures to write a story.


Trista liked the app because she could see the pictures then write about them. Blake agrees with Trista and he liked the app because he could be creative and write a story.

Lauren liked the app because she got to shake the I-pod. Most apps that we use work by touching the screen but story cubes works in a different way.

Beau and Aiden both didn’t like the app because they thought they didn’t get to use the I-pod enough during our literacy rotation time.

This app has helped us with our writing because we have had to think of words to describe the pictures which were on the dice. This allowed us to practice our descriptive writing



History using iPods

This week using the iPods has been fun as we continued to explore the apps Strip Design and Storykit. We are using these apps to help us to write about the history of our local area.

We had 8 old pictures of Brisbane city from a long time ago to look at. In pairs, we selected two of the pictures and took photos of them with the iPods.

We then selected either Storykit or Strip Design and uploaded our photos from the camera roll on the iPods. Once we had our photos the way we wanted them on the screen, we then typed in our sentence about the photos. These sentences are what we call "because" sentence. They say what has changed from one photo to the other and why we think this change happened.

What we really liked about using these apps is that each of our work looked different, because there are so many choices we can make about things like the background, the font, the size of the photos and how we position our photos and text on the page.

Luke thought storykit was easier to use than strip design because he found it harder to know what to do when he used strip design.

Tahlia and Matina found it great that she could make different backgrounds in storykit. They used the storykit paint program to do a coloured background.

Andrew liked storykit better than strip design because when you logged onto strip design it is a bit confusing to know what to do.

Rory, Patrick and Finn liked strip design because they could add stamps and different stickers to the photos, a bit like making a comic strip.

Axelle liked storykit because the work you do is saved automatically into a section called bookshelf.

Lucy found it easy to delete any mistakes she made when she used storykit.

Hannah liked how in storykit you can create any kind of story you like.

Next week we will be using these apps to record our responses to other photos so our teacher can see how much we have learnt!