Today’s Web 2.0 tool (i know, I know, I didn’t get to yesterdays) is Show Beyond. Technically I covered two the other day (Lino it and Wallwisher) so I hope that will suffice 🙂

I came across this little nugget at Gail Lovely’s (@glovely)’s session at ECOO 2010 – Web 2.0 tools for young learners. This year, my consultant role was turned from a Secondary role to that of a K-12. To help my own professional group, and to best support elementary teachers and students, I have been researching and taking part in sessions geared to younger students as well as those of high school age. Check out Gail’s website. She offers a lot of neat ideas and resources.

Show Beyond is a great, and simple, little platform that allows you to upload pictures, add text, 30 second voice recorded clips, and background music to create neat little multi-media stories. The site is really easy to navigate and provides lots of opportunities for users to learn how to make dynamic stories and share them with other. After all, what is a story if it isn’t shared? Here is a quick tour of the site.

To show you how fun and easy the site is to use, I want to walk you through the project of my five-year old daughter, Medea. Now, Medea is a funky young lady who loves to explore and craft with daddy. Just the other day, she and I created a sweet little Christmas boat. More on that in a future post.

This “craft”, however, is a little less traditional and very techno-cool.

Check it out here –

Step One (Find Images): We started with Medea at the computer;I asked her what she would like her story to be about. She said seals, so we started at Google. I asked her to type “Seal” into Google. She did a great job of sounding out the word and typed “sel”. I helped her out, mentioning that she missed the “a” – crazy silent letters!

I showed her the “Images” link at the upper left corner and she was faced with a number of seal images. I asked her to choose and, when she did, she clicked it and was faced with the preview. At this point, I showed her the “Show large Size” link, how to right-click the image, and save it to her folder on the computer.

From this point on, she typed in “Beaver” (beaver was hard, too. What’s up with those silent “a’s”?) and “Crab”. She remembered how to select them and save them. I made a little video of her using the computer and will post once I clean it up.

Step Two (Upload the Images): Show Beyond has a simple interface and I was able to ask Medea to click the orange button to add her pictures (upload you images). She chose on picture and I told her to click “OK” – not showing her. She did after locating it herself. I asked her to click it again and this time she learned how to use the Shift+Click function to select all. She thought this was pretty cool and uttered “Watch and Learn” while they were uploading (I sure hope that shows up in the video).

Step Three (Ordering the images): Now, I asked Medea to organize the images in the order she wanted (great task to teach sequencing). She rearranged them a bit and said she was done.

Step Four (Narration): Time for the headset. She put the headset on and I mentioned to her that she will record a bit of her story for each slide. At first, I clicked the button for her, but she was on her own about half-way through. She recorded all of the slides with her story and, by this point, was getting a little tired. Hey, she’s only 5:-)

Step Five (Story Text): As she was getting a little tired (just recovering from pnemonia), I had Medea tell me the story and I typed the text for her, word for word.

So, there you have it, a simple multi-media story presentation that is dynamic.

Skills she used:

She Selected the Pictures using Google Search, Downloaded them by left-clicking to choose and right-clicking to save (I set the folder up ahead of time). She uploaded the images (with some help to start then on her own), organized them into a sequence she wanted, narrated the slides using a microphone headset, and retold the story to me to type for her.

Pretty cool – and she’s only 5!

Once it was all finished, she emailed the link to her story to Mom (at work), Grandma and Grandpa. All within an hour or so.

Give it a shot. A nice simplistic little program that is as dynamic as it is easy to use. Let me know what you think.

Oh, and it would be cool if you’d leave Medea a comment on her story. She’d love that 🙂
Check it out here –