Assignment #6: Storify

In Monday’s scavenger hunt, we used Twitter to report. Today, we’ll use another app, Storify, to condense that content into something that can accompany a news story or serve as a stand-alone narrative (this assignment is adapted from Dave Burdick’s tutorial)

The Assignment

Storify your scavenger hunt with the following:

• All your own Tweets
• Your top three favorite Tweets from clasmates
• Your top five Tweets from other schools
• At least five responses you made to students from other schools
• Your Vine
• Don’t just add all this content and think you’re done! You must also include a narrative (text) about the experience. Make it interesting, and make it worth reading.

Due: 10a Monday, Feb. 16. Publicize, adding #WVUblogJ and #JRLweb tags, and post link in comment to assignment post.

The How-To

Getting Started

1. Go to Storify.com and log in with your Twitter handle
2. Browse through the stories there to get a feel for what’s possible
3. Click the “Create Story” button at the top right of the screen and create a Storify page (choose Public Story) of your team’s scavenger hunt – each member creates one.
4. This must be curated – not just a list of tweets – so include explanatory written detail, links, maps, and other information that fleshes things out

Adding content

1. In the left panel, add a title and description for your story in the blanks, then write some intro text in the main frame.
2. In the right “Media” panel, click the Twitter icon (the little blue bird) and type in “#WVUblogJ”
   • You can search users and keywords too, but start with this for now)
3. Drag tweets and images from the right panel to where you want them in the left panel
   • You can click “Images” to just display images to use, “Timeline” for tweets a single user sees, and “User” for tweets from that user
4. You can also include elements from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram & Google by clicking the relevant tab on the right panel
5. You can embed links to specific sites as well – just click the little chainlink icon, enter the URL, and drag it to your story (OR highlight the text to link, click the chainlink icon, and paste in the URL)
6. Add text by mousing over blank areas before or after your content links. A yellow bar will appear. Click on any of these to enter text

Publishing your story

1. At the top right of the left-hand window is a big, friendly blue “Publish” button – click it
2. You’ll get a window with a Publicity message that lets you send this to Twitter or Facebook and also inform people you quoted
   • You can change these from their defaults to something better
   • You can skip this and send it later by clicking “Notify” at the top of your story panel
     • This is a great way to publicize what you’re doing to the people who helped you do it!
3. If your Storify is associated with an actual news story (e.g., something in the DA or WVU News), and you’re embedding the Storify at the end, switch the default link to that of your story
   • NOTE: You can’t embed this code in a WordPress-hosted blog, but you can post to there by clicking “Export” (at the top)
   • To embed: Click “embed” (below the headline of your story) and copy/paste the resultant text to your story (or blog post).