We learned that story making is fun, but also a long and grueling process. We learned that making up ideas is really hard because everyone wants their ideas to be the main idea, but there has to be sacrifices. Everybody just wants to finish early and that is why we found it hard to do redrafts and editing, because it becomes really hard to deal with because of the deadline. In the end, everybody is happy because we're teaching and learning at the same time. Heart Home  Read Our Stories What We Learned The Writing Process What are eBooks?   One of the activities we loved to do was the scanning of the hand-drawn pictures for the stories. We learned how to use the scanning software and how to change the images in Photo Impact. Stories everywhere. Keeping track of stories during scanning can be a real mess! Here is a story written in Microsoft Word getting changed into a Microsoft Reader eBook. This is our teacher Mr. Roberts trying to make sense as to what happened when a story was converted into an eBook. The conversion process was fairly easy, but the eBook didn't always look like the stories we originally wrote. We were divided into teams both for the creation of the books and the making of the website. Some kids were illustrators, others designers, some acted as editors. Some of us were in charge of scanning pictures, others converting our stories into eBooks. All this stuff took a long time and the website was our last job. We worked as a team to decide how the web pages should look and what should be included on the site. When we looked to designing our web pages we decided that they should look a bit like the other projects of Literacy Alive. We decided to keep the main titles in the same font and made sure that our colours matched well. We went with the heart designs on the main page, the background and near the links because this would match our title for the site. After the site was completed, we had to test it out and see if everything worked OK. We had to make sure that the stories would open in Microsoft Reader properly. This was new for us and we had to experiment quite a bit before things worked. We are quite proud of our work!! Student comments on the project: "I really liked the scanning and trying to fit the pictures into the stories." "There were so many saved pictures that it was easy to get mixed up when we tried to put them into the stories." "Putting the stories on Microsoft Reader was easy but they looked different than when we started." "Keeping track of who was typing their part of the story and where they saved it was crazy." "Trying to find some of the stories to make into eBooks was a pain because people saved them all over the place." "I never knew that deciding on colours could be so hard." "I thought it was cool to see my pictures and words on the site." "Claris Home Page wasn't that hard. It was just like a word processor."

This project was designed to fulfill the following Ontario Ministry of Education Language and Art Expectations: -communicate ideas and information for a variety of purposes and to specific audiences -revise and edit their work in collaboration with others -use correct punctuation -use writing for various purposes and in a range of contexts -contribute and work constructively in groups -integrate media materials into their work -read aloud, showing understanding of the materials and awareness of the audience

 Heart Home Read Our Stories The Writing Process What We Learned  What are eBooks?  

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