Wednesday, April 23, 2008

PanRaven Storybook

PanRaven is a fairly cool tool and would be a fun thing to have kids use as part of a project. Potential applications might include use with a reading/writing lesson, compiling research photos and notes from a field trip or science experiment, or a culminating project for a history exploration unit. PanRaven could be used for nearly anything you or your students thought of. PanRaven storybooks can also be printed, which might be an interesting potential present for students' parents/families.

This is the first time I've used PanRaven. I feel very comfortable using it, and in all likely-hood will use it again in the future, but I did have some issues with aspects of PanRaven. The main concerns that I have are in regards to site connection/processing speed and user interaction/interface. I noticed that it sometimes took the site a long while to connect and respond to user input. This includes uploading photos. There was a considerable wait time while I was attempting to upload photos from my computer. Granted, most of them were very large and high res. I am wondering if this upload speed problem will really be exaggerated if you have 25 students all trying to upload their photos to PanRaven from one wireless classroom at the same time. Occasionally the interface was 'clunky'. The PanRaven story editor takes a bit to load, even with a fast internet connection, and was at times frustrating. Overall, PanRaven has some issues, but I feel that the end product and its potential applications far outweigh any of these issues.

A Summer With RPI

1 comment:

skipvia said...

That was a truly enjoyable storybook and one that is certainly worthy of being printed someday. Great photos of what looks like a great learning experience for you.

As you know, I share your frustrations with Panraven--particularly the slowness of uploading media and the unresponsiveness of the site when you perform certain operations such as adding a picture to your story from the media well. I think some of that slowness may be due to network saturation, but then again we don't notice the same behavior with Flickr or VoiceThread. I hope this gets worked out over time. I also agree that these problems severely limit the potential functionality of Panraven as a classroom tool. One possible workaround would be to have the teacher upload everyone's images to a single location before the students begin telling their stories. Students could use these media resources in their own stories without having to upload their own photos. It's an extra step, but it avoids the potential bottleneck of having 25 students uploading dozens of photos at the same time.

I do think that the end product--the storybooks themselves--are compelling enough to continue to explore the possibilities of Panraven as a classroom tool.