 ZooBurst is a digital storytelling tool that lets anyone easily create his or her own 3D pop- up books. Using ZooBurst, storytellers of any age can create their own rich worlds in which their stories can come to life.

 Zooburst can be used as another way to publish stories written by children.  Zooburst allows the authors to maintain a moderated discussion forum for each book, providing a virtual space in which readers can interact with one another. Students can make comments on each others stories and the author determines if the story can be viewed by others.  Ability to be used at any level.

 At the top right is a “show instructions” button that walks the user through all of features.  Authors can easily share their story using a simple hyperlink, books can be embedded in any website or blog, or the book can be ed to others.  If a user clicks on a character, dialogue can be inserted.  Users can upload any personal photos to be used in the story.  Users can spin the book around to view from any angle.  I liked the duplicate page feature so I didn’t have to recreate my background scene over and over again.

 The available picture library is quite limited.  The Adobe flash plug-in must be installed to view the finished book.  There is a web cam mode that allows a reader to interact with the book via a web cam, something called Augmented Reality. I tried several times to get this to work and couldn’t.

 Zooburst offers two types of accounts. A basic account and a premium account.  The basic account is free with a simple registration. It offers users 10 books per account with up to 10 pages per book.  The premium account is $9.99/month or $49.99/year and offers users unlimited books with up to 50 pages per book, sound, voice recording, ad free books and the ability to manage a classroom by setting up student user names and passwords.

 My son and I created this story based on one that he had written in Kindergarten.  Joseph’s Zooburst project Joseph’s Zooburst project