Literacy Resources

I have never really been sure about how to use the animation  Flat Life, first seen on the BFI Story Shorts 2 dvd.  However, today I think I might have found an outcome for the film. Through the post I received my own copy of Building Stories by Chris Ware - a book that is definitely [...]

This is a fairly dark story about what happens when we destroy nature.  As the buildings and ‘others’ take over the text becomes harder and harder to read – just as it becomes harder to hear in the story.  This is an interesting book telling a story that is occurring more and more frequently in [...]

We quite often play a game on training days suggested by Pie Corbett in his book JumpStart! StoryMaking called Disasters.  Pie gives an example of 5 disasters for Superman such as his Dad tells him not to start fights or  his Gran gives him kryptonite pants for christmas. In order to be able to play [...]

  A wonderful trailer for use in literacy.  How soon before you know whether the thing carrying him is friendly or not?  What are the clues?  What effect does looking up at the tree canopy give?  How would you describe that opening in writing?  From whose point of vew? Children could capture an image of the text and [...]

Engaging The Eye Generation by Johanna Riddle is a wonderful example of a teacher sharing how she integrates literacy with visual or media literacy in her classroom.  What is also fantastic is that the publishers have created an online edition of the book for us all to read. In the book, Johanna shares with us how she [...]

For some time now we have used film to support writing.  Here we use a Scooby Doo trailer to explore how focusing on different aspects of a film changes the writing. Scooby Doo – Batman Trailer Uploaded by Leeowen We always turn the sound down on this trailer and stop it before the Batman outline [...]

Visual literacy is a vital part of life nowadays. It exists as an area in its own right but it can also be used to support the teaching and learning of  writing. This post is an attempt to describe how we do that. We:- use images to support understanding of literary techniques, e.g. putting title slides in [...]

There is a lot of talk at the moment about Animoto.  This is a site that you upload your images to, you can now add text and add music and it will then turn  your pictures into a film zooming in and out of the images and changing the transitions. My question is how is [...]

For the month of January I thought I would focus in on resources that can help us develop digital storytelling in the classroom. What is digital storytelling?  Well I think the easiest definition is story telling using tools on the computer which could consist of  sound or images or the orchestration of sound, moving and still [...]

comic-life-pod - to hear about Comic Life click on the link.   This is a fantastic bit of software.  It takes pictures from your computer or captures them from a webcam and then puts them into a comic format.  See the software at http://plasq.com/comiclife-win where you can download a free 30 day trial.  You can add text and [...]