Whether it’s planning a multimedia video project, writing a play, envisioning a story, creating a comic or preparing for a presentation, storyboards are great educational tools to practice the planning of a formulaic story.1 This activity exercises students’ planning and visual thinking skills while they develop a comprehensive idea for a story’s main elements in a graphic organizer. Today I want to walk you through, step-by-step how Webspiration Classroom™ service can help your students create a storyboard and work collaboratively.
Create a Template
First, create a new diagram in Webspiration Classroom. Begin by drawing six boxes for each scene, connecting the scenes in sequential order. Create a text box under each scene to allow your students to create a brief description of the scenes.
Share the Template with Your Students
Next, in order to make the storyboard available to your students go to “Tools” on the top menu, select “Make Template…” and click “School” after naming the template. This posts your templates to the school’s templates so that all of your students will have access to the document. Now, you can instruct your students to view and open the template from the “Documents Manager” under “Starter Docs.”
Visually Create a Story
Once students have opened the template, instruct them to fill each box with visual images to represent each scene. Students can find graphics in our built-in Symbol palette or insert images from the web or from a computer file. Here are a few tips to help your students get started:
- Add Images for Each Scene
To change the graphic on the template, students can click on the box and then choose a symbol in the graphic library. If students have an image from their computer or web that they would like to import, they can click on the box and go to “Edit” on the top menu, click “Insert Graphic” and select the location of the graphic.
- Describe the Story as It Unfolds
Under each box in the text box provided, ask your students to give a brief description of each scene. To do so, students can click on Each storyboard should describe:
- the characters in the scene
- what the characters are doing
- the script or background sounds
- the length of the scene
- and the viewer or camera’s point of view.2
Share the Storyboard with Others
Next, ask your students to form small groups to share and provide feedback on the storyboards. To do so, have each student go to “Sharing” on the top menu, select “Collaborate and click “Invite…” From here, students can add the usernames of their classmates and share each student as a collaborator or a reviewer. Once students have shared documents with their classmates, they can add comments or chat in the Collaboration panel to provide feedback about the sequence, logic, clarity and description of the storyboards.
Webspiration Classroom and other Inspiration® Software tools will help your students create and identify relationships between characters, dialog, background sounds, timing, and perspective while exercising skills in planning and visual thinking. Let me know how your class’ storyboards turn out!
Thanks for stopping by to learn about storyboards in Webspiration Classroom!
Thinkspiration Ambassador, Inspiration Software