Digital Storytelling & Presentation Tools

I’d like to avoid death by PowerPoint this week, so out of our choices, I’ve chosen to explore ThingLink and Pixton. Pixton is a comic and storyboard creator. Users can easily create their own stories with different layouts: comics, graphic novel, or storyboards. There are different preset backgrounds, templates, and characters to include and images and art can be uploaded for personal customization. Characters can be posed with a variety of facial expressions. The finished product can be printed, downloaded, embedded, and shared on the web. Pixton can be used on interactive whiteboards and across different platforms such as Mac, Windows, Chrome, Andriod, and iOS. With Pixton, a group can collaborate on a story and use Pixton to develop storyboards.

Here is an example of a comic strip I made:

ThingLink is a tool where multimedia content can be embedded into images and videos and slideshows can be created. All it takes is selecting a spot on the image, clicking that spot, and then, inserting a link to an image, website, video, etc. that provides additional information. Like Pixton, this tool was very easy to use and it didn’t take very long to create an example. Within a group, students can each contribute by selecting appropriate multimedia and embedding them into images.

To start off our weekend holiday celebration, my family and I spent the lovely day at a beach with friends, then we had a picnic at a nearby lake. We spent the rest of the day catching fish and crabs at Northwest Branch Back River. This was the first time my kids went fishing and my son helped to reel in this eel! The squirming eel made my son decide that he didn’t want to get too close to it. 🙂