Creating Digital Books

Creative activities help children express their feeling, and emotions,  their ideas, and the way they view the world around them.  Since children learns how to use tech gadgets so easily, why not use technology to help children be creative?

Want to offer more digital books to your children or students that is on their reading level? How about creating digital books for them using Book builder. You can also use this free online tool to let your children or students create their own digital books.

Storybird is another authoring tool that lets children or student create their own digital books and share them on any device.

Storyboard Generator is another tool for creating digital stories. Users can either chose the script or bulid their own storyboard.

To have animated stories, use Zimmer Twins, children or students can use the babble clips to make the character, talk, yell or sing. They can use the action clips to let the character walk, run, dance or more. Close up clips can be use to express expresion like surprised, angry, scared and more. When children or students add a clip, the clip is added to the timeline at the bottom of the screen, they will see a preview of the clip and a sentence about the scene.  To make their story, children or students can change the underlined words in the sentence. As they clicked on the words, options will pop out and the scene will change according to how the sentence is changed. Basically, the character, background and the object that the character is holding can be changed just by clicking on the selected options. The longer the story, the more interesting it would be; and  children or students can add more than one clip to the timeline, rearrange the clips if they want to change the order in their stories or even delete a scene if they want to.

Domo Animate is almost the same as Zimmer Twins, both allows user to have scenes and edit them through a timeline.  But in Domo Animate, there are more characters to choose from. There is no sentence describing the scene either so the user is more free to label the scene as how h/she imagine it. Children or students will really liked the animation effect that they can add to make the story more entertaining.

Kerpoof is another online tool to create a story or a movie. Users has to select a movie, select a storyline and scene, select a character on the panel on the right of the screen. To add speech bubbles, users have to select the say method and type in the resulting Message box.

Creating stories about personal experiences not only makes one remember happy moments but also makes sense of things around them. If you want your children or students to use their photos to create a story about their vacation, their pets or whatever story about them with their own pictures, then Animoto is a great tool. Children or students can choose the style they want from available templates, can add soundtrack from the music library, add  some captions and title cards to create their own story.

Another tool to create a story with their own pictures is Slidestory, the user can use his/her own pictures and narrate with his/her own voice. However, it is not a cloud based tool, the user has to download Slidestory Publisher.

Want to create a story with just phrases or few keywords?Try PicLit. Children or students can drag and drop the right words and arrange them correctly to tell something about a certain picture.

Game Design Tools

Creating games stimulate children's creativity and critical thinking skills. Here are tools that will help students or anyone interested in creating games learn how to design a game:

1. Gamestar Mechanic -  a game based quest to teach kids the principles of game design. Every time someone play a game or completed a quest he/she get access to avatar, backgrounds, and other things that were used in the games that he/she played. These rewards can be used in designing his/her own game.

Sprite Shlep

Clean Slate

2. Scratch - It is a free educational programming language that allows anyone, children or adult to create visualization, stories and games using Sprites. 

3.  Kodu - It needs to be downloaded but it lets anyone, children or adult with no design or programming skills create games on PC and XBox through a simple visual programming language. It can be used to teach creativity, problem solving, storytelling, etc.

4. GameSalad - It is an authoring tool lets anyone even with with no coding knowledge create games then publish them iPhone, iPad, Android and HTML5.

5. AgentSheets - It needs to be downloaded and only offer free trial but it lets anyone create their own agent based games and simulations through a user friendly drag-and-drop interface

Free Online Screen Recording

When I was attending P2PU Massive Open Online Classes (MOOC) class called Machinima, I learned about Screencast-O-Matic, a free online screen capture recording on both Windows or Mac computers with no installation required.

In the short screencast  above, we were in Second Life and I was having a problem getting on the cube so I was not able to jump on one like what the rest of the other participants are doing. I was graduating at that time and busy with my internships and Networking class so I wasn't really able to devote as much time to the Machinima class as much as I want to.

Another free online screen capture recording with nothing to install is Screenr. You can record your screen on both Mac and PC and the screencast even plays on iPhones.