ZooBurst

ZooBurst Claimed By Jessica Song

"ZooBurst" is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3D pop-up books. It can be accessed using a computer with Internet access and Adobe Flash plug-in. Certain items in the book can be made "clickable", which helps readers to learn more about the various characters in the book. This is similar to the reading coaches that we used when we created our books on UDL. Characters can also have chat bubbles that pop up when they are clicked, which makes for a very interactive book. I have signed up for the free version of "ZooBurst", so I am unable to add sound animations. However, if I were using this in a real classroom, I would look into upgrading to premium membership so students can enjoy all the functions available on "ZooBurst".

There are obvious advantages to this program, as many of you have posted on my Discussion page. However, there are not that many choices for images. For example, my story is about a boy and his grandma. There are different images of a boy and woman available, but not the same character doing different gestures. I used a comic strip creator called "Toon Doo", and it had various images of character and allowed you to change their facial expressions and hand gestures. This function would definitely make this program better. Also, when you enlarge the characters, they become blurry. For example, on one of the pages, I had a picture of the boy with his toys. Obviously, the boy has to be larger than his toys. Once you enlarge the boy, it becomes out of focus. Also, if you make the image too big, the text bubble goes outside of the page, so it gets cut off. The program that I previously mentioned, "Toon Doo", allows you to place background settings and automatically illustrates the entire page and fills in the appropriate details. However, in "ZooBurst", you have to add every little detail yourself and often times, the choices of images are few.

Overall, unless you're artistic (which I'm not), I would shy away from using this program. I did create a book using "ZooBurst", but I have also created a brief comic strip using "ToonDoo" that I would also like to share with the class. This is still a fun program to use, but graphically, it's not as nice as some of the other Web2.0's I've seen. I would use this program at least once for students to create their own book using a memory that they have. It is interactive, and I would imagine the premium membership will make the program better for students to use.

http://www.toondoo.com/privateView.toon?param=C502qkifRVnRNutmdkM9mZQPKXzfi%2FPvjAjE%2FvxkGHgHTm7Q4eul1Q%3D%3D

This is only a three frame comic strip, but you will be able to understand what I am talking about once you see all the functions of this program.

The "ZooBurst" book I created can be accessed using the password: edla615.

http://www.zooburst.com/book/zb0_4cd81f1f0a210