Andy Katz left a comment on my review of Smilebox . He prompted me to check out the company he works for Panraven , which I incidentally already had bookmarked in July 2007 and had not gotten back to it. Panraven offers

a solution for storing your media (photos, video, & music), and then provide a process for creating "stories" that can be shared online or professionally printed in photobooks.

EMBEDDABILITY

• Being able to embed the finished product directly into a blog is really important to us elementary school teachers, since it minimizes the opportunities for students to encounter inappropriate advertisement or material uploaded from other users to the site (ex. YouTube) as well as it minimizes the distractability factor we are especially dealing with the lower levels.
• The finished book was easily embeddable in my Wordpress blog. I just had to tweak the code a little to make the width fit in my theme. Somehow it did not allow me to change the width to anything other than the pre-set 8oo px before Panraven generated to code to embed.

Collaboration

• Panraven offeres the option to invite "Friends" and create groups. Friends, that are all members on Panraven are able to share media with each other. Non-members of the service can also be as friends, they are able to view your stories, but are not able to share and use each your media,

Media

• Media can be uploaded through your browser, Picasa, or Picup (an uploader application) but sadly no Flickr mash up. Since I upload and organize all my photos in Flickr , it is extremely important to me to have the option to directly mash up with a new tool. It saves time and effort to upload the same images over and over again. I already have my photos organized in sets on Flickr, which makes finding a certain group of images easy.
• There is storage to upload text, photos, audio and media to your account and integrate into your story and/or share with your friends.
• A member can use media from their own uploaded content, their friends who are also members and from public media. The public media option is a nice addition and gives you choices of adding maps, illustrations, text, photos, and videos.
• I uploaded a video file (.wmv) and was told it uploaded successful, but was not able to find it later in my media folder. I tried to search for valid media file formats and only located that images had to be .jpg and.gif format. No help on video format. Giving it another try with a .mpg video file.—. The .mpg video clip immediately showed up under my video media, but would not play in the preview mode. That is too bad.

TEMPLATES & LAYOUT

• There seem to be a fair amount of templates available and I also liked the different layouts for individual pages, that vary media sizes and text.

EDUCATIONAL USE

• I can see teachers use this service to create their own storybooks, then embed them into their classroom blogs.
• BIG PLUS- Panraven is a free service, no limited features. There is a price if you choose to have your book printed professionally.
• The ability to share media with friends shows great potential for use in the classroom. A teacher could upload the media for a given project and students would be able to create individual books. I am not sure if there is a way to invite other collaborators on one given project though (Like Mixbook ).
• Students need to have an e-mail to sign up for the service. I guess a teacher could use Gmail by creating e-mails that will be filtered through their main account with username+extratext@gmail.com
• I especially like the ability of mixing media. Uploading your own audio, video and photos is great. I am hoping, I will soon figure out how to include my video so they actually play in the storybook. A great addition would be if the ability of directly recording onto each page would be an available feature…similar to Windows Photostory . The less steps, less tools, less importing and converting in creating a complete project is required, the better for the younger elementary students and their teachers.

You can read more about Panraven’s features on their website. Check it out and let me know about your experience with the site and what educational use you see.

Posted: 26. December, 2007 at 3:07 pm. Filed under: Reviews, Storytelling.
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