The app Our Story was developed by a team at the Open University to enable children, young people carers and adults to make their own digital ‘picture books’. Each photograph in the picture book can have a recorded audio track of speech or sounds, as well as written text which appears at the bottom of the picture. The app is simple and can be used by three-year- old children.
The app was developed to
- help increase children and young people’s interest, engagement and motivation in reading
- by providing a different experience to written books
- enable children to begin to tell stories and narratives
- use the power of personalised stories about the authors or people they know to enhance
- what children and young people learn
- provide a new context for shared book reading between children and adults, a process
- known to help the development of literacy
- enable children and adults to take a creative role in authoring their own digital stories
The initial work on the app was funded by the Open University, a subsequent development of the app was funded by the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology (CREET). More recently further significant developments and expansion of the availability across platforms of Our Story has been funded through the Arches project