As part of our continuing iPad App March Madness promotion, I’m featuring the “losers” from our March Madness bracket as they are eliminated. Story Kit was certainly one of my pics to make it out of the first round brackets. But it was paired against Socrative Teacher/Student, the well-known and popular “clicker” app that can be used for formative assessments. StoryKit is more of a creative app, so they were two very different competitors. The results of this match up showed how popular both apps are, with a StoryKit only losing this match by one vote. It’s a good thing we had an odd number of votes . . .I didn’t have plans in place for how to break a tie if one occurred!
StoryKit is actually an iPhone app, so if you are looking for it in the App Store, you may have to work a little harder to find it on your iPad. But if you want students to create and record, this app does it all! Want to take photos and use them to tell a story or write a report? The app is fully integrated with the iPad camera. It also has tools to add text, simple drawing tools, and accesses the iPad’s microphone to allow for audio recording. You can add pages to the story you are creating to make a book that can be shared online with a simple tap that creates a shareable link.
Users will want to be aware of two quirks to this app, though. The first: since it is an iPhone app it only operates in the portrait view, meaning you cannot use the wide-style keyboard for typing. The second thing to be aware of, is that the text you write is not visible when you are using the recording tool. So if you want to record word for word what you’ve typed, you’ll need a pretty good memory, or you’ll have to write it out on paper. Ugh.
I’ve seen lots of first graders use this app with great delight and great success. Sometimes they draw their own pictures on paper and then take the camera picture of their own art work to put into their book! Sometimes they bring family pictures from home, lay them on their desks and snap pictures of the pictures!! You can see some examples of student projects using this app at these pages on our website: