Topic: Reading for pleasure and exposing students to interactive digital stories.
Platform or tool: Book Creator
Rationale:
In my current school most students are familiar with reading digital stories through the apps Reading Eggs and Epic! which include some media aspects like audio narration however, they lack interactivity that allows the reader any control over the direction of the story. I often witness students repeatedly tapping their iPads to turn the page without reading the story. For this digital storytelling project I have chosen to retell the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood in the hope that by creating an interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ type story, students in years 1 and 2 will be more interested and engaged to read the text rather than just progressing through to the end. To help maintain the interests of the students, I plan to include at least two possible endings to the story.
I am using Book Creator because it has the required functionality of hyperlinking between different pages within the book and the ability to insert media. According to Campbell and Narayan (2017) Book Creator has its own platform that books can be published to, allowing readers to access the book without having to log in or be limited to viewing it in a PDF or video capacity. It also includes a ‘read to me’ option where the words are highlighted as the computer reads the book to the user, which Dobler (2013) suggests assists students to visually track text. I will also be using websites such as Flikr and Canva to help create the content of my story for a more pleasurable interactive reading experience.
References
Dobler, E. (2013). Looking beyond the screen: Evaluating the quality of digital books. Reading Today, 30(5), 20-21.
Campbell, M. & Narayan, S. (2017, July 26). How we created an interactive choose your own adventure book. The Book Creator Blog. https://bookcreator.com/2017/07/created-interactive-choose-adventure-book/