Storybird & Storify

I wrote stories in Turkish when I was at secondary school. But the experience of Storybird and Storify were my first attempts of writing stories in English. Also, they were the first experiences of writing stories online. I was very excited when I published them. Because the two stories would be seen by everyone and it was kind of proud.

There is a guideline which is about presenting our visuals to everyone. The guideline consists of arrangement, balance, color, legibility and appeal. It is important that visuals should be appropriate for students. And preparing a story like I did should be for students. How to make these stories according to students’ needs? We can follow this guideline. Arrangement should be consistent. For example, the storyline should be clear that students will not confuse while reading. Then, the correct color is really important while reading the stories. The background should not be darker than images and text. While I was constructing my story, I paid attention to it. Thirdly, legibility is also an important point so that students will not have trouble while reading the story. The font should be big enough. Then, the story should be appeal so that students want to read more. Every teacher should teach these to their students so that students can read more consciously.

Moreover, I want to compare these two story maker applications. To be honest, I loved Storybird more than Storify. Because I could not get the idea of Storify. I found more backgrounds and visuals in Storybird. I could construct my story with different pictures. However, in Storify I could not even add another page for my story. It occurred only one page. In Storybird I added pages and it was like a real story book.

Students can use encoding and decoding while generating stories like me. Encoding means writing and decoding means reading. Students can listen their teachers before forming a story or they read some guidelines about how to form a story. This can be decoding and students can be sure what they do. Also students encode while writing their stories. Practicing and producing teach best to students.