Are you interested in making your own multimedia stories on tablets/iPads or smartphones? With the freely available Our Story app, you can easily create your own story in pictures, text, audio, video or a combination of all of the four. Sharing is easy and can happen online or you can print your finished story in four different sizes.

This session is open to anyone interested in creating and sharing stories with young children, children with special educational needs, elderly people or young adults. You will hear about other projects where Our Story supported children’s learning in the classroom, story-sharing in local communities and bridging the home-school divide.

More about Our Story projects and research is on this website: http://www.open.ac.uk/creet/main/projects/our-story

The event will take the format of a short presentation, followed by a hands-on activity and story-making with the app. We will provide 15 iPads but if you prefer to use your own device that’s fine too, just bring it along. The Funologist events exist to allow community partners, students and staff to network in order to generate real-world innovative educational projects. They take a format, in which a partner spends 30 minutes presenting, the challenges they would love to solve, and the opportunities they see. We spent the rest of the time workshopping ideas, and drawing together proposals - which we hope to turn into real projects.

The session will be led by Dr Natalia Kucirkova. Natalia is senior lecturer in Early Years and Childhood Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research concerns innovative ways of supporting shared book reading, digital literacy and the role of personalisation in early years. Natalia’s doctoral research inspired the development of the Our Story tablet/smartphone app. She is the founding convenor of the Children’s Digital Books and Literacy Apps Special Interest Group of the United Kingdom Literacy Association.

Find out more about EdLab at www.edlab.org.uk