Reading and writing and being creative with Storybird

Recently, while I was preparing a seminar on using pictures, I came across a great site for using pictures to create stories.

Storybird

http://storybird.com/

What is Storybird?
Storybirds are short, art-inspired stories you make to share, read, and print. It is a fun, collaborative, storytelling website.
Storybird was designed to allow children to work with parents and friends in creating art-inspired stories to share and save. It is also now a very popular tool to for use by teachers with their students around the globe. Users choose from art hosted on the site and build a story around those images that can then be shared with family and friends. Storybird encourages creativity and is a web tool that supports working collaboratively.
The final product can be printed, watched on screen, or shared in an online library with the world. You also have the option to keep it private on the network. 

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/storybird-new-teacher-boot-camp-lisa-dabbs

There is a great slideshow explaining how to use Storybird:
http://www.slideshare.net/WakeCountyPublicLibraries/whats-your-storybird-how-to-use-storybird

I would suggest that you can use Storybird as a source of reading material.  I just keyed in the word 'tall' into the search bar on Storybird and it came up with 3,441 stories by 659 people and using pictures by 18 artists.

I read one about negative and positive feelings called 'Standing tall' that I liked (I 'hearted' it actually - a 'like' for a Storybird story).

And then of course, you could use it with students to write stories.  Storybird provides the pictures (you could use the same set of pictures as a writing challenge first and maybe they could move onto choosing their own set of pictures).

I definitely

http://www.zastavki.com/eng/Love/wallpaper-28182.htm

Storybird!