A Review of Cowbird, a Free Storytelling Platform

By Wei Cen

Cowbird allows its users to combine images, text, and audios to tell stories, making it a suitable platform for students to practice making rhetorical choices of visuals, sounds, and words for digital writing projects. For example, for a Literacy Narrative assignment, students will be able to incorporate a photo of an important person in their literacy development history, a report card, or a book cover and write a story about it. They may also add music to their stories or upload their stories as audios. Besides personal stories, interviews, oral history projects, and other non-fiction writing projects may find this website a possible hosting place.

Because of the website’s simplicity, drafting and publishing a story is easy even for students with lower levels of technological literacy. Students will be able to experiment with digital storytelling without being intimidated or distracted by technology. In addition, the website is accessible through all popular Web browsers and stories will be safely saved online, so students do not need to worry about losing their work. The sharing and commenting features allow for a dynamic conversation among teachers and students. Students may also share an account and work collaboratively on group projects.

Overall, Cowbird is a very user-friendly digital storytelling platform with a potential for academic use in the composition classroom.