Storify as a Research Tool

Storify is a free curation tool that allows users to find information using a specific hashtag or keyword(s).  When searching, Storify will pull Facebook posts, YouTube videos, tweets, news articles, sound bites, GIFs, etc.  If it was posted with the hashtag you are using to search, you can pull it up.  Storify does require that you log into your social media accounts if you intend to search there.  For this purpose, you could use a classroom account so students are not logged into their own and getting distracted.

Students can use the tool to curate content on current events, historical events, people, etc.  Let the students be creative.
One blogger shares her ideas on how to use Storify in the classroom:

Research Logs: Storify can be instrumental in organizing sources. If it’s online and public, it can be incorporated into a Storify story. This is especially beneficial for students who are working with a lot of online material. Plus, sources can be annotated directly in the Storify interface. In this way, I am able to see how students are interpreting information in their own words and access their curated elements directly from Storify.

Informal Writing: While it’s awesome for collecting existing information, original writing can be made the central focus of a Storify story. Composing reading responses and reflections using Storify gives students the option to create intertextual, multimodal documents where they can interact and engage with the material. In my own class, we returned to their Storify stories later in the research process to talk about audience and what their readers might expect to learn about the topic. Students annotated images and social media that reflected what their readers might expect or value, describing how, perhaps, it related to their audience.

Presentation Tool: Storify is public, shareable, and easily accessed on the web, making it great for in-class presentations for both students and instructors. On more than one occasion, I’ve used several YouTube videos in my lesson plan. Rather than taking five minutes before class to pull up each individual video in separate tabs in my web browser, I’ve simply created a Storify that included all of the videos I needed for class. All I had to do was pull up my Storify to access them all in one place. Steph Hedge’s post on teaching with twitter describes how Storify might also be used to compile student tweets about a common reading or video for a later discussion.

Click here for an example of Storify.

Watch below for a tutorial: