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Six Good Digital Storytelling Tools In One Place

For the last four or five years I have been telling people about Timeline JS whenever they seek suggestions for multimedia timeline tools. It’s a free timeline tool that should be in the toolbox of every social studies teacher. The same people who created Timeline JS, Knight Lab at Northwestern University, offer five other tools for creating and publishing digital stories.

The aforementioned Timeline JS offers an excellent way to make multimedia timelines through Google Sheets. Students enter dates, event descriptions, links to images, and links to videos into a Google Sheets template provided by Timeline JS. The timeline is then displayed in full screen with a horizontal scroll. The videos that students link to in the template are played directly in the timeline. And as an added bonus, your students can even include links to Google Maps locations in their timelines. Watch the following video for a tutorial on Timeline JS.

Juxtapose JS from Knight Lab is a free tool for making and hosting side-by-side comparisons of images. The tool was designed to help people see before and after views of a location, a building, a person, or anything else that changes appearance over time. Juxtapose JS will let you put the images into a slider frame that you can embed into a webpage where viewers can use the slider to reveal more or less of one of the images.

Storyline JS is one of the newer Knight Lab offerings. This beta product is designed to help students tell stories with data. The basic purpose of Storyline JS is to help students can create interactive line graphs. Students add annotations to the data points their line graphs. Those annotations are used to tell the story of the data represented in the graph.

Scene VR is another beta product from Knight Lab. The purpose of Scene VR is to enable users to stitch together panoramic images and VR images to create an immersive photo story. Stories published through Scene VR can be embedded into websites and viewed on desktop computers as well as on tablets and mobile phones.

If you want to embed audio into a written story, Soundcite JS is the tool for you. Soundcite JS lets you add audio clips to a written story. When Soundcite JS is properly used, a play button appears where you specify in the text. For example, if I wrote a story that included a scene in which a dog barks, I could have “the dog barks at the stranger” be highlighted with a play button that when clicked plays the sound of a dog barking.

StoryMap JS lets you combine elements of timelines and maps to create mapped stories. On StoryMap JS you create slides that are matched to locations on your map. Each slide in your story can include images or videos along with text. As you scroll through your story there are simple transitions between each slide. StoryMap JS integrates with your Google Drive account. To get started with StoryMap JS you have to grant it access to your Google Drive account. StoryMap JS will create a folder in your Google Drive account where all of your storymap projects will be saved. With StoryMap JS connected to your Google Drive account you will be able to pull images from your Google Drive account to use in your StoryMap JS projects. Here’s a good tutorial video made by Jan Serie Center’s Digital Liberal Arts initiative at Macalester College.

These were last week’s most popular posts on FreeTech4Teachers.com:
1. Now You Can Include Google Slides In a Google Document
2. Tube – A Distraction-free Way to Search and Watch YouTube
3. Novels on Location – A Map of Novels
4. Podcast Recording and Editing Tips
5. Google Adds New Security Features to G Suite for Education
6. How to Create a Custom Google Forms Theme
7. My Go-to Tool for Making Stop Motion Movies

New Online PD Opportunities
On PracticalEdTech.com I have two new professional development offerings. First, on April 26th I am hosting 5 Ways to Blend Technology Into Outdoor Lessons. Second, on May 7th I’m launching a self-paced course about classroom video projects.

And for the rest of the month, group packages for my G Suite for Teachers online course are on sale. Two schools jumped on the sale this week. If you have five or more teachers register from your school, you get 40% off. Have more than 20 and you can get an even better deal.