This week several students were working on autobiographical narrative writing assignments that required them to use dialog.  Students often struggle with writing dialog.  During the Digital Kids Saturday seminar, my co-presenter shared StoryboardThat, a free program that allows students to create storyboards. Storyboards can be beneficial to students who are struggling with forming dialog.  By adding their characters into frames and having each character speak through his or her bubble, students can visually comprehend who is speaking when.  This visual dialog may then be transferred to dialog frames with quotations and appropriate punctuation. StoryboardThat would be a great, too, for our students that are learning English.  It can assist students with understanding sequence, and would make an excellent prewriting/brainstorming tool.  StoryboardThat has historical backdrops that would apply to history.    It would be applicable for use in World Language classes as well.

StoryboardThat offers a free version and provides a version for teachers that is priced by a monthly fee.  If you find that this is something you would use regularly in your classroom, you would want to look into setting up an educator’s account. I haven’t had the opportunity to use StoryboardThat, but I have colleagues who know all about it, so if you have any questions I’d be happy to assist you with implementation.

Example for Spanish