Allowing secondary students to get in touch with their inner child

The technology that I explored this week was ZooBurst, a tool that allows students to make their own pop up books online. Here is an example of how I think students could use ZooBurst in a history classroom, in this case to present the story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. I could not get the Jing to post here so just click here to view the show or you can click through it on your own here on the blog. Just make sure you click on the dialogue exclamation points above the characters.




One of the advantages of using ZooBurst in a secondary classroom is that it brings the "fun" factor back to school assignments. Many students will be familiar with pop up books from their younger childhood and will often have enjoyable memories associated with their favorite ones. Therefore, a ZooBurst would be a great tool to encourage students to use for presentations of information because it would be more fun than a powerpoint. Another advantage is that ZooBurst fits very well with the content of history. One way to make history more engaging that I will use in my classroom is presenting it in terms of stories and this technology fits perfectly with that theory by encouraging students to think about history as a compilation of stories as well. Furthermore, the ability to use imported images as backgrounds to each page and for people in the story allows students to express geographic context, relationships between characters, and symbolic ideas visually, benefiting those students who are best at illustrating their knowledge in visual ways or through storytelling.

Since it might only be beneficial for certain students who express themselves well in the format of a story or latch on to the appeal of the connection to their childhood, I would use this as one possible option for students to use for a presentation assessment, along with other possibilities such as a Prezi, a speech, or a song. Although I think it is very useful that ZooBurst allows storytellers to associate a speech blurb with each character on each page, which has the added bonus of getting students to think from the perspective of a historical figure, the blurbs make each page of the story look rather crowded, often obscuring background pictures and disrupting symmetry or aesthetics. This is not the best technological tool for artistic perfectionists in my future classroom because it is designed for younger students who may not worry as much about how cleanly presented each of the pages are. However, the advantage of this is that it is very straightforward to use. Unlike Prezi or Google Earth, there was no learning curve for me with ZooBurst as I was immediately able to jump in and use all of the tools to import, move, and resize pictures. The only other disadvantage I noticed is that the free version limits users to ten page stories. However, that is not necessarily a bad thing because one important thing for history teachers to teach their students is how to determine and emphasize the main points in any historical narratives.