By Ozge Karaoglu

“We are our stories, we compress years of experience, thought and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves”  Daniel Pink, a Whole New Mind

Digital storytelling is using technology to tell stories.  It’s a great way to develop visual and media literacy, promote reflection, engage students in their own learning, improve speaking and writing skills, to collaborate, reflect and evaluate.

Here are the first 25 digital storytelling tools that you can use in your classes or just to tell your digital story. I’m sure you are already familiar with some of them and I hope you can find new tools to use.

With Slide, you can create your slide shows with different skins, animations and transitions. You can also create guestbooks for your sites. It allows embedding.

SlideShare lets you upload your powerpoint presentations and share it with others. You can add podcast to your ppts as well. You can embed it. It’s also a great site for improving yourself. There are good ppts ready for you to learn and get inspired.

Imageloop is another site that lets you create slide shows with different animations, skins, transitions. You can add music, create a guestbook and embed it.

I’ve just written about ZimmerTwins on my previous post. It’s the best way to create your digital cartoon and tell a story with it. I’m sure you and your students can create wonderful cartoons.

Pimpampum is another site I’m a fan with its applications. The first one is Bookr, you create online books using Flickr pictures. you can decide on the number of the pages and embed it or send the link to others. The second one is Phrasr, you write anything you want and it finds images that match with each of your word. You can send the links to others. Great way to wish a birthday!! The last one is Bubblr, create your comic strip with Flickr pictures and add bubbles to tell your story!

Create your beautiful slide shows and share them with the world with 280slides.

Animoto lets you create your videos less than a minute. You just add your photos, choose music and add your text. Animoto does the rest.

Animasher allows you to make animations and to animate the pictures.

Voki is a site where you can create your speaking avatar. You can record your voice, or you can use text to speech.

Voicethread is the most famous digital storytelling tool. You add pictures or your videos and let others comment on it.

BubbleJoy allows you to place yourself inside an interactive video greeting card that you can send to others.

I’ve mentioned about BombayTV on my previous blog. It’s a tool for writing subtitles for Bollywood films. You can also record your voice or use text to speech application. There is also BombayTV2 where you can edit different scenes from Bollywood films together and add subtitles to them. ClassikTV allows to put them different scenes together and add music+effects to it. Also, you can have a look at FuteBolTV where you can add subtitles to football matches, you can record your voice as well.

With Animata, you can create animations and backgrounds.

You can easily create a slide show from images anywhere on the web with BigHugeLabs.

BigUniverse is an engaging website. You can read book online or you can create your own and publish it.

BubbleSnaps lets you add bubbles to your pictures and create slide show.

Capzles is a way to combine your videos,photos, blogs and mp3s into a multimedia storyline.

ComicBrush lets you mix artwork and create comics  from a fun collection of comic backgrounds, characters and photos of yours .

Writeboard is a shareable web based text that shows you every edit and let you go back anytime. It’s a great tool for collaborative storytelling.

With DandeLife, you can keep record of the events of your past and present. You can add videos and pictures. It’s a great timeline and a online journal!

This was originally posted on Ozge’s blog and is reposted here with the author’s permission. 

Özge Karaoğlu is an English teacher and a freelance edTech teacher trainer and an e moderator at British Council’s ELT Sharepoint. She currently works at Terakki Foundation Schools as an English teacher and the leader of the kindergarten department.

Ozge’s Blog - http://ozgekaraoglu.edublogs.org/

Ozge on Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/ozge