Storybird

Storybird is an okay platform for engaging children in storywriting, but has a lot of limitations. What I am more concerned about is it's commenting/chat model. Storybird allows all users to comment on each other's stories platform-wide and allows all users to be tagged in comments. There is no way to disable these features, nor is there any way to limit commenting only to a particular classroom. There is also no way to limit comments to be within a particular age group. My child commented on a story, and the writer has been sending her daily messages in a mature adult voice, asking her personal details about her after school activities, favorite ice creams, age, grade level, city, etc. This other user initiates every conversation, and asks increasingly probing personal questions. There is nothing specific inappropriate about the questions themselves -- but the entire thing feels inappropriate for there to be someone asking my 7 year old child personal questions (in an adult voice) and for me to not be able to turn off the commenting. When I contacted Storybird, they told me that their site purposely has no restrictions on commenting, that they encourage relationship building between children and adults who are strangers to each other. They said that every comment is moderated by their team -- which is fine for preventing something completely inappropriate or sexual, but which does not solve the problem in general.

This site was absolutely amazing a few years ago; before they made their grand update, but there are so many mistakes and irritating things now. I'll list a few of them for you: - You have to buy membership to create something with their artwork, so poetry is no longer free for anyone to write - Long stories can't be longer be more than a specific amount of words unless you buy membership - When a story is "too mature" they'll tell you, which is great considering kids are on this site, but they don't tell you what the mature content is, so you won't always know what to change and you can edit your story hundreds of times without it helping - Before the update, you could see and reply to comments when you expanded the notification box, but now you can't, so you sometimes have to scroll 30+ comments down on your story to find the comment you haven't seen - There is no good and easily understandable guide to how to post stories that aren't finished. If you post a few chapters, but you want to make more, it's easy to write them, but when they have to go through the review process it's not specified how to only send the new ones to review - The new poem idea is just really bad. The whole idea of having to make a poem with random words was amazing. It would teach children (and you) to think, to create sentences and to be creative in general with the little you were presented with. This new thing where you can just write whatever words you want has completely robbed us of the creativity in using what you've been given instead of what you've chosen - "Following" and "followers" has been removed. Before the grand update (in 2017? 18?) people were friends on Storybird. You could easily talk to each other in comments, and you had a section where you could see stuff from people you were following, so you could support your friends, but now with that gone, friends aren't easy to have there more. You have to click on people to see their stuff, so you won't do it as much. The whole socializing and supporting each other has almost disappeared from the site All in all: BAD :(