When I was in grade five I spent part of my school career in the United Kingdom. School was a little less formal there Storybird_logo_New_Gotham-500x500than it was in the USA and I was able to work on a writing piece I started earlier much of the time. This included skipping math, a big bonus for me! Once in awhile the teacher would take my writing and read over it to see how I was progressing. Mostly he just told me how terrible my handwriting was and did not give any ideas for how to better my story.  Thankfully I mostly ignored his words and continued to write. However, 38 years later, two things bother me: Why did he care about my handwriting so much and what happened to that story? Well if I had the StoryBird website back then, my problems would have been solved. I am just as neat a typer as anybody else and my story would be living in the digital world for me to look at later on. But StoryBird is really more than something for my problems. It is a fantastic writing universe for authors used by over 400,000 educators around the world. The site accommodates picture books (along with scaffolded ideas), long form books and whatever other type of writing you might like. Readers are easily able to interact with the author via comments and likes.  

Simple Uses?

  • Start a class library of published books from students
  • Share books with other classes and the library for comment
  • Create a writing club that can be done school or district wide for better sharing and camaraderie
  • Create a competition in the school for winners to be shown on the site. Motivate those top writers to do more.


Do I Plan To Use It?

I would love to introduce this to more people. Our librarian is already familiar with it as he used it in a previous school and has a couple of students on it now. What a way to keep and curate a collection of school work.

Commitment And Learning Curve

The commitment is big in some ways. If you are going to continue to use a service like this, then you will need to tailor your final writing pieces around it. The site itself is fairly easy to use though.

Best For

ES/MS/HS

Cost

Free!

Website

Storybird.com