We Do Listen - Animated Online Stories and Lessons for Children

The We Do Listen Foundation offers free animated stories, games, and lessons for children. The books and their corresponding lessons are designed to help young children learn about things like how to be a good listener, what to do about bullies, and good sportsmanship. All of the books feature the character Howard B. Wigglebottom.

The We Do Listen Foundation's games are a mix of matching activities, spelling games, and pattern recognition games.

Children can create their own Howard B. Wigglebottom stories on the We Do Listen Foundation's website. The foundation provides online tools and templates for writing and coloring their stories. You will also find templates that you can print out and have students color offline too.

Applications for Education
Reading or watching the Howard B. Wigglebottom stories could be a fun way for students to learn about proper school behavior. Creating their own stories could be a good way for students to express what they think are proper social interactions in school.

Fake Newspapers and Talking Tomatoes

Fodey is a free service that offers you the ability to create fake newspaper clipping, "talking" tomatoes, "talking" squirrels, and a few other simple animations. I discovered Fodey after seeing Wesley Fryer use the fake newspaper clip generator in one of his blog posts.

Fodey's Newspaper Clipping Generator allows you to create a fake newspaper clipping just by typing or pasting text into a form. Fodey then creates the clipping and provides you with a code to embed the clipping in your blog or other online space.

Fodey's Talking Tomatoes and Talking Squirrels are simple animations to which you add text bubbles. The animation then flashes through a couple of transitions of speech. The amount of text and number of animations are limited. That said, Fodey isn't trying to promote its talking animations as a full-fledged storytelling platform. Check out my talking tomato below.


Applications for Education
At first I didn't think much of the Fodey tools, but after some reflection I realized that the fake newspaper clippings and the simple animations could be used in a Glogster project. Students could also download their fake newspaper clippings and use them in slide presentations or as a still shot in a documentary video.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
A Great Glogster Tutorial
The New Glogster Edu is Live
The Scratch Workshop

Memoov Looks Promising for Digital Storytelling

Memoov is a free service for creating animated videos. Without downloading any software or having any special skills, Memoov allows users to create animated videos up to five minutes in length. Creating an animated video with Memoov can be as simple as selecting a setting image(s), selecting a character or characters, and adding dialogue.

Memoov offers users a wide variety options that make it stand out amongst similar services. Memoov allows users to customize the appearance of the characters in their animated videos. On the dialogue front, Memoov gives users the option to record their own voices for use in their videos. Users can also upload pre-recorded dialogue in MP3 format. Memoov users have the option to add background music to their animated videos.

Select a setting.














Select and customize your characters.












Add dialogue via text or audio recording.













Applications for Education
Although in my initial testing there were a couple of bugs, Memoov could become an excellent way for students to create short animated stories. Memoov's option for recording their voices will enable students to add truly personalized elements to their animated videos.