Friday, 19 February 2010

Storyjumper


A Tweet appeared on my Tweetdeck this afternoon telling me about Storyjumper, an online storytelling tool.  Now, as you know, I am very fond of Storybird, and didn't want to be unfaithful, but curiosity got the better of me and I had a look.

The interface is certainly different to Storybird, and it took me a little while to work out how to get the images I wanted onto the page, and how to move and resize them.  After an hour I had produced a book, written in French, called "Mes Animaux", which you can read here

So how does it Storyjumper compare to Storybird ?

Good things about Storyjumper:

There are lots of pictures to choose from.
You can pick exact pictures to suit your story.
You can change font style and font size.
You can put the writing anywhere you like on the page.
You can upload your own photos and pictures and use them in the story.
You can make foreign language stories public (it would appear).

Good things about Storybird:

Beautiful images that capture the imagination.
The stories are embeddable (if written in English).
It's easy to do a screen print of the pages and convert to PowerPoint.
You can write comments for other people about their stories.
The team behind Storybird are very helpful and responsive.

So, in my opinion, each one has its pros and its cons, and there is definitely a case for using both.  I will certainly be showing both to my FLAs at our next training session.

UPDATE 27.2.10:

Here are links to my Storyjumpers:

 
Mes Animaux - a boy describes his unusual pets





Sé contar - counting from 1-10 in Spanish

L'oiseau vole - describing what a bird sees as he flies along

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the write-up, Clare! I'd like to think StoryJumper is helpful and responsive, too :-) Actually, if you select the "print a paper copy" link from your story page, then dismiss the print dialog, you'll have a nice, large pdf-style version of your story that you can easily print screenshots from. (Loved your "Mes Animaux" by the way...)

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  2. Thank you so much for your response, Blake. The PDF trick will be a very useful one. I'm looking forward to playing with Storyjumper some more soon !

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  3. Hi Clare, this is a very useful comparison. I shall be presenting both versions to the MFL depts in my town. We no longer have advisers so this is the closest we get! Thanks for your information, Joanna (pixiejojo)

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