Features

• Create stories to suit students with a wide range of abilities

  Stories can range from just a single page with few words, to stories with many pages and many words to a page. Predictive text is available to help with typing stories - this learns from the words a student uses but can also be turned off if desired.

• Use your own pictures, videos and sound effects to create high-interest social stories which can be directly from the student's world

  Use the pictures included in the database or capture pictures from a video file, a Webcam, the internet or use any picture on your computer or an attached digital camera.

• Over 24,000 words (New Zealand English) with recorded sounds in the database and you can add your own words. Other languages have different numbers of words in their associated databases.

  StoryMaker makes it easy to add words and record the sounds for them. Record different sound forms for a word to produce natural sounding spoken sentences.

• Create word sets for each student to help them create their own stories

  Show thumbnails for words in a set if you wish. Words from a set can be added to a story by clicking on a word or dragging and dropping into the story. Create as many word sets as you like for any student and export for use by others.

• Parts of speech can be colour coded

  Allows parts of speech to be coloured in word sets for creating stories, or when working with stories. Choose which parts of speech are shown in a word set . Colours can be customised for a student.

• Add videos or sound effects to each page

  Videos or sound files can be played after a page is completed when listening to a story or on completing tasks such as clicking on the words in a page or recreating a page. Greatly aids comprehension and motivation when working with books. Pictures can also be used for this.

• Easily select the parts of a video or sound file to use with a page

  Select different videos or sound effects or different parts of the same videos or sound files for different pages of story. Use as many videos or sounds (or pictures) as you wish with any page.

• Many options to assist learning to read and write

  Listen to a story being read, read the story with the words spoken on mouseover, click on words as requested, or recreate the pages of a story (helps develop understanding of sentence structure and can be a first step to a student learning to write). Students can record themselves reading pages of a story and this can be compared with the pre-recorded speech. There is also an option where the student types in what is on the page of a story.

• Teach sequences of actions

  Create stories to teach the order of actions - for example getting dressed, washing hands, starting a converstation, etc.

• Group activities can also be developed where several students are working together.

  Many different types of activities can be created - such as dragging the right words or pictures into sentences, responding to questions about videos or sounds by dragging in words or pictures or sounds, or by typing in answers.

• Save as PDF

  A story created in StoryMaker can be saved as a PDF (without video or sound effects), printed, or exported (with all multimedia) to USB or other location. Can be exported as a single zipped file and made available to others who are using StoryMaker via Dropbox or other file sharing software. All the stories in a story group can be exported at the click of a button. A set of Stories in New Zealand English that cover a range of levels are available for purchase - most include videos and related activities.

• Integrates with the latest Flashcards

  Students added in either StoryMaker or Flashcards are available in both and words and pictures added by the user are available in both. Words in Flashcards sets can be brought straight into word sets in StoryMaker (used to assist students writing stories) and stories in StoryMaker can be used to create word sets in Flashcards (for the same student).

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