The 4 C's, Bloom's, and Storybird

I stumbled upon this cool digital storytelling website called "Storybird" while exploring different technology tools. As an ELA teacher for middle schoolers, I could certainly see myself implementing this tool in real time. Storybird offers a few different opportunities to enhance reading and writing skills, falling under the main categories of "Challenge," "Read" and "Write." The Challenge tab offers writing prompts, quizzes, video tutorials, expert writing advice, and even Storybird-authored, featured writing. The Read tab displays hundreds of animated written works appearing as longform stories, comics, flash fiction, poetry, etc. in various genres. And the Write tab is used as an entry point to compose one's own picture book, longform story, flash fiction, poetry, or comic using the Storybird search tool to browse the artwork of more than 1,000 global artists to get the storyboard underway. Once stories are created, they can be embedded in blogs, emailed or printed depending on their purpose.

A unit I have been eagerly wanting to teach is [Overcoming] Personal Challenges. After reading and thoroughly discussing the chosen texts as a class, I could introduce Storybird to my students with the expectation that they produce their own stories and reflect on their individual experiences with personal challenges. They would be encouraged to draw from strategies used by characters in the texts or come up with new and personalized strategies particular to their needs. This would put Storybird in the "Create" category of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy since students would be producing a story that is their own, based on what they've learned throughout the unit. Providing students with an opportunity to create their own product can make the learning more authentic and meaningful to the student, and because Personal Challenges is such a universally applicable topic, it is important to me that students can apply what they've learned to real life situations.

Storybird would most certainly speak to the Creativity piece of the 4 C's based on its innovative approach to writing. It creates space for students to explore their own thoughts and ideas, and supports them in doing so by following a streamlined process that breaks storytelling into manageable pieces, and in a fun and colorful way that keeps students intrigued. Additionally, the added element of asking students to weigh in on and consider strategies used by characters in the texts to resolve their own conflicts opens up the doors to Critical Thinking, as it involves questioning and challenging what the student has come to understand over the course of the unit. Higher-order thinking skills are necessarily being used here to evaluate one's learning and construct new meaning out of that learning.