Working with Our Story

To work with Our Story you need to go to http://www.ourstory.com/ and register. You can create your own timelines and stories or participate as a guest, collaborating on someone else's creations. Apparently you need to be at least 13 years old to be able to join in. You have to give your name and e-mail and choose a password. There are two types of member: basic or premium. To be a premium member you need to pay $49.95 per year and you get access to more features (the possibility to manage multiple privacy circles, the chance to create unlimited profiles and the access to a rich text editor and spell check).

With a basic profile you can create a timeline, add stories to it and contribute to your friends/colleagues's timelines. The tools are not difficult to use, although they could be more intuitive and flexible. The layout is rigid and we couldn't find any possibility to change the timeline timing, for example, which could be useful since the video runs a bit fast.

You can add text, photos and video to your story but you cannot add audio files, which could be an interesting feature. On the other hand, it's very easy to upload, add or discard pictures and video.

You can decide who can watch your timeline: everyone, you or your connections. You are also given the possibility to print your stories in a book or archive them on a DVD, provided that you pay for them, of course. You also have the chance to send a story as a postcard.

To help users organize the information, the site provides questions sets organized by topic: "My Story", "Family Story", "Baby Story", "Life Story", "Love Story", "Group Story", "Travel Story", "Remember When?" and "Timeless".

Users can send invitations to other people and ask them questions, to encourage them to collaborate.

The search tool is not very effective. It is very slow and the information you get is not very effectively sorted out. The results are organized in terms of people (users) and stories and the search is done word by word, so you waste a lot of time looking for the correct result, among lots of other useless information.

The site includes a timeline widget export that works more or less like YouTube's: you can choose the colour and size and you get the html code to embed it into your MySpace, Blog, website, etc. To be able to do that, your timeline has to be accessible to everyone.

To practise, we tested the site with a simple biography of a famous actor: Brandon Lee.

(posted by Ana Paula Rocha, Eunice Oliveira e Dora Lopes)

Class Yearbook or Class Journal

To explore the collaborative potencial of Our Story timelines and stories, it is possible to create an yearbook or a class journal, registering the main events going on through the school year. Each student may give his/her contribution, adding an event or giving more information/resources/comments about the ones that already included. At the end of the year, it will be fun to remember all that the students have gone through and it will be rewarding to see all the progress they have made.

(posted by Ana Paula Rocha, Eunice Oliveira e Dora Lopes)

Our Story - ways to save or show it:

OurStory can be printed in a book, archived on a DVD or sent on a postcard, besides the possibility of posting it to a blog, messenger, Delicious, Netscape, etc. Our Story Groups alows you to enter into a community where you can share your interests. With Our Story you can write a journal and add comments to other people's stories.

Cool, isn't it?

(posted by Ana Paula Rocha, Eunice Oliveira e Dora Lopes)

Historical events

Timelines are also useful when presenting a period of history. Not only do they allow you to present a chronological list of events, but they also can include other references that can help you characterize the time: lifestyles, fashion, role models, music, literature, arts...

In the 10th grade, for example, we discuss the different generations. Students have to characterize the different decades from the 1950s up to the 2000s. Our Story timelines would allow them to organize the information of each decade in topics and illustrate it with photos and videos. The dynamic collaborative features of this tool is ideal for group work.

(posted by Ana Paula Rocha, Eunice Oliveira e Dora Lopes)

Fiction

Our Story can also be used to explore fiction. When analysing a short story or a novel, for example, students can create timelines to organize the events in the story.

The teacher may also create a timeline to present / summarize the main events. To make it more challenging, it may be incomplete and students have to collaborate in its creation. Or it may contain mistakes and, in this case, the students' task would be to spot them.

To develop their creativity, they can also be given a timeline and write a story based on it.

(posted by Ana Paula Rocha, Eunice Oliveira e Dora Lopes)

Biographies and autobiographies

Our Story timelines can be used to present biographies in class. These can later be used as a model (after which the students create their autobiography or someone’s biography), as the basis to create a text or as information source for a quiz, for example.
Biographical timelines can also be a starting point to practice structures such as the simple past.
This is an example of a timeline about the US president Barack Obama:

(posted by Ana Paula Rocha, Eunice Oliveira e Dora Lopes)

Our Story Demo

(posted by Ana Paula Rocha, Eunice Oliveira e Dora Lopes)

OurStory - a web 2.0 tool to create your own stories

OurStory goes beyond blogging to permanently capture life's stories in words and photos. Students can publish and share stories with the whole class and their teacher. This is quite an interesting web 2.0 tool as it leaves everything to creativity. Students can use the information from a short story or build their own timeline to support a new story. This will allow them to inspire or inform others, to gain support, to facilitate communication, to make dreams come true. This site offers an opportunity to learn outside the classroom. OurStory can lead students to write inspirational tales or describe a personal experience and at the same time point out some of the problem spots in the student's writing so as to improve them.

(posted by Ana Paula Rocha, Eunice Oliveira e Dora Lopes)