Screencast-o-matic
an easy and free tool for creating screencasts–videos that capture screen activity and your voice–so that you and students can create and share tutorials, video journals, and other screen-based videos
Knightlab
a suite of open source tools for digital storytelling; developed for journalists and media makers, but easy to use and engaging for novice users
- Juxtapose: compare two images
- try it with Goleta in 1994 and 2018
- make your own by downloading Google Earth Pro and selecting Historical Imagery
- Timeline JS: present a story that occurs over time
- can include text, image, and video to present and analyze an event
- also great for an interactive resume
- Storymap: present a story in a specific location
- try it with some photos of Goleta and this Lemon Festival video
- you can also annotate an image (rather than a map), but you need to host the image files on your own web server
- Soundcite: add soundclips to text
- here’s a soundclip you can use: http://sorapure.net/guitar.mp3 (just paste this where Soundcite prompts you for an audio URL)
- works best with WordPress; in other words, create the soundclips in Soundcite and attach them to text that you publish with WordPress
- Storyline: attach annotations to a basic line chart to tell the story behind the numbers (still in beta but works fine)
- here’s my example with numbers from the Professional Writing Minor
Sutori
A platform for students and teachers to create multimedia stories/presentations and collaborative projects. The free version has “basic” options of text and images; an educators’ version ($99 per year for unlimited students) has the options of adding video and quizzes and using premade templates.
Thinglink
a tool for annotating images with text, links, images, and video; costs $35 per year for 35 students, and you can add more students for $1 each (pricing plan)
DataBasic.io
a very easy set of tools and resources to analyze and visualize data of various types, including word clouds, document comparisons, and network visualizations
Canva
a free drag-and-drop document design program, useful for creating flyers, infographics, and other text/image combos
Storymaps
free, powered by ArcGIS (which also has a free option), with templates for map-based tours, points of interest, in-depth narratives, presenting multiple maps, and more; lots of tutorials, examples, and help available
- here’s an example of a student project using Storymaps from Trish Fancher’s Writing 105M class
