1. Talk about the project with your students. Technology can be a great motivator to get your students excited about writing.

"The final outcome of our writing will be to create a multimedia story using text, graphics, motion and sound."

2. Show students the rubric.

3. Expose students to the prompt.

4. Go to the lab to look at backgrounds and stamps in Kidpix to make connections. Use Inspiration at the same time to web possible story ideas. (Lab visit #1)

Here is the web to the right.

5. Choose one idea from your Inspiration idea web to write your story on. Create a new Inspiration web on just this idea. You can begin in the web mode and then change to the outline mode to help students develop their thoughts for a rough draft. (Lab visit #2)

6. Write - We encourage this be done on paper while in the elementary grades unless your students are proficient typers. It is harder for the ideas to flow when your students can't find the letters on the keyboard.

7. Draft/Revise/Edit - If you feel your students are ready they can move to typing their story in order to revise and edit easier. It not necessary for this KidPix project because they will be typing the story in the text boxes in KidPix when they publish.

8. Publish/Share (Book/reserve at least 5 days in the lab to complete the Publishing phase)
A. Once you are ready to publish the first step is to have your students find the natural breaks in their story.
B. Have your students title their story.
C. Create each page
i. Draw background for the first page, add stamps and/or animations
ii. Create a text box and type your first page.
iii. Record the text using the recorder in KidPix
iv. Save the page naming it page 1
v. Do each step for every page in the story naming each page in order.

D. Once you have completed each slide then you are ready to place them into the slideshow and add transitions. You can save the project as a Kidpix Slide show and if you want to share it on the web or with parents you can export it to Quicktime and save it as a QT movie.

Here a sample of the finished project in Kidpix.

Here is a sample of the finished project in KidPix3