Digital Story Telling: Creating Animated Shorts in the Writing Classroom

As a final project for a unit of study on short stories, I have created a lesson in which students will write their own short story and create an animated short story. During this unit, students read a variety of short stories and excerpts from novels. To read some of the story starter prompts that students used to generate ideas for their short story project, check out these Prezi presentations:

"He Said, She Said" for the novel excerpt Flipped

Picturing Green Gables, a lesson on describing setting

For the animated short film, I considered using the following web 2.0 tools

GoAnimate

GoAnimate offers less control in terms of characters and design. In addition, it is a bit less expensive, but only offers yearly subscriptions. For my classroom purposes, I would have to buy a 1 year subscription for $99 to allow my 36 sixth grade students to have access and a secure environment where individual students would not need to sign up with personal information.   

Xtranormal

Using Xtranormal, I was able to create a secure environment using an upgraded package. While the cost is up there, about $36 per month to give my 36 sixth graders access, it allows students to create usernames and passwords without having to provide any personal information about themselves.  In order to have each student sign up for an individual free account, they would have to provide the site with some personal information.  

Ultimately, I chose to use Xtranormal for my students because the platform allowed for more control over the look and sound of their animated film. In addition, I was able to spend less given that we would only be keeping the project for about a month. 

(At left, students using laptops in the classroom to create short scenes of dialogue from their short stories using Xtranormal.)

Based on student comments, they enjoyed creating their animated shorts even more than they enjoyed working with StoryBird. I enjoyed spending time working on mini-lessons on craft before each writers workshop in which they were given time to write, time that they could plan on daily, in order to develop their short stories.