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PrimaryEnglish

Use Simple Apps To Help Your Class Self-Publish Their Own Beautiful Digital Stories

With the vast array of apps and websites available to children today, everyone can be a digital author

Dan Oakes
by Dan Oakes
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PrimaryEnglish

The idea of children writing for a purpose is certainly nothing new.

The challenge of working towards creating an end product that is intended to be read by an audience wider than that of their immediate classroom is a huge incentive for any child.

It breathes meaning into the learning process and the prospect of being ‘published’ gives them the feeling of being a ‘real writer’ – leading to a deeper understanding of their chosen genre.

Over the past few years there has been something of a revolution in not only how we access stories and books, but also how they actually look. With the increasing popularity of digital books, reading has suddenly become an entirely new experience. Readers can now become immersed in not only the words themselves, but atmospheric music and beautiful digitally-drawn animations that move across the screen.

Global audience

We’ve been working hard as a school to equip children with the confidence to use a variety of apps to enable them to become aspiring authors, professional artists and more importantly, their own publishers, enabling their unique and inspiring writing ideas to be read by a global audience. While it may initially appear quite daunting, the world of digital books is actually within any child’s reach once they have the inspiration for a story.

The App Store has a wealth of stories that showcase the possibilities of digital storytelling. Flewn is a beautifully illustrated, animated story of a gentle whale carrying a community on its back as it walks on stilts through a barren wasteland. The children scroll through the story at their own pace, listening to gentle background music.

We shared the opening of Flewn, pausing at specific images in order to engage with them. This tale provides a wealth of opportunities to model how the reader should be questioning everything: what can we see? Where might this be? Where do you think the water is coming from?

The children were then free to read the story independently. At various points, we paused to draw attention to the style of the piece, how it is written using rhyming couplets, how the illustrations complement the writing but also add a different dimension to the story.

The beauty of a digital story such as this, is that children can set their own pace, swiping through the images and words at their leisure. Some children used this time to look deeply into the detail of the illustrations, others enjoyed the choice of vocabulary more.

Pogo kangaroo

Having been captivated by the story, we began to unpick some of the key themes of the story. The beauty of having a whale as the main character in the story is that it is a gentle creature in a completely foreign and hostile environment. It is travelling in a way that it is entirely unaccustomed to. What other animals could the children think of that could be put in a habitat or environment that would render them quite vulnerable?

Inspired by what they had read, the children came up with some incredibly creative ideas such as a camel on water-skis, a squid in a hot air balloon and a kangaroo on a pogo stick in the desert. They really let their imaginations go wild.

With their creative juices flowing, the children were free to write their own stories; editing, improving and amending as they would normally. Once their stories were complete we brought their ideas to life by using a few simple apps to empower them to produce their own professionally created publications.

In the past, if you wanted to find images to compliment a story you either had to draw them yourself, which relied upon your individual artistic ability, or you could try and search Google. Inevitably, you would never find something to completely suit your story. Where on earth would you start to look for images of squids in hot air balloons, or sharks on skateboards in the desert?

There is no end of easy to use photo editing tools, but perhaps the simplest one that gives the best results is an app called Pixomatic. It allows you to layer several photos together and has a smart cut-out feature that easily enables you to create any image you can imagine.

The children used this to design the perfect images to complement their story. But how to create the illusion that these images had actually been professionally drawn by an artist, as opposed to a series of photos that have been cropped together? The answer for us was Prisma. By using some of the incredible artistic filters in this app, we achieved a beautiful hand-drawn effect that made it look like an original piece of commissioned artwork.

Fluid storytelling

There are several ways to publish the finished story. Book Creator now comes with the option to publish ten books online once you set up a teacher account. You can then share either a link to your book, or put it on your school website. We’ve found this method really useful when some of our Y6 children have written stories for their foundation stage reading buddies and we’ve wanted the parents to see what has been created.

However, what makes Flewn such a magical experience is the way the story flows. There are no pages, it is one long fluid digital scroll that we can glide through at our leisure. To recreate this effect, we used Adobe Spark Page. This is actually a website building tool but enables you to recreate the same motion as the book. Visit tinyurl.com/danoakes to see one of the books we created.

Technology for us has removed barriers: not only those that can exist between children of different abilities, but those that exist between children and the professional world. There are no longer limits to what is possible. Empowering all children to become published authors has reinvigorated writing in our school and highlighted to children that in today’s world, the possibilities are indeed endless.

Dan Oakes is deputy headteacher at Malmesbury C of E Primary in Wiltshire and an Apple Distinguished Educator. He offers consultancy across the UK. Find him at danoakes.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at @oakes_dan.

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