High School Authors

Katie Mason, an intern at Lee High School from Trinity University deserves a gold star! She had this great idea for having her students write children’s story or a children’s show and asked me if there were any apps that would be good for this. Well, you can only imagine my delight!

We decided upon allowing the students to choose from 3 apps:
Puppet Pals, Toontastic, and Story Kit.

The criterion were:

1 Character Archetype
1 Situational Archetype
1 Symbolic Archetype
1 Set of Foil Characters
A non-traditional plot structure like the one we see in The Princess Bride
Narrator with either 1st or 3rd Point of View

She had a Storybook Final Assessment prepared with a checklist and rubric for the students. In addition, she had a Brainstorm-Storyboard which the students used to help prepare them for writing their story/show.

They then used this brainstorming list to write a reflection piece about their thinking behind why they chose the characters, point of view, archetype etc that they did. This they wrote in Pages on the Mac and turned it into an ePub which they loaded onto the iPads in iBooks. A very innovative way to turn in a project. The kids loved it and the final projects came out really good.

Below see a sample of what the final ePub looked like. The file is also available for you to download it into your own iBooks if you have an iPad.

ePub file: Caili and Karissa

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3 thoughts on “High School Authors

  1. I hope you’d consider submitting a presentation to iPadpalooza–we are hosting it in Austin at Westlake HS on June 19. Looks like you all are doing some good work!

  2. Thanks! My tech partner, Lisa Johnson, and I have submitted a few presentations. We are looking forward to it.

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