Acclaimed storyteller, folklorist and author Diane Wolkstein died on January 31 following emergency heart surgery while traveling in Taiwan. She was 70.

Both Wolkstein’s storytelling and printed works delved into the culture and mythology of many countries, and she often traveled to a country and spent time there when conducting her research. She was in Taiwan last month working on her most recent project, the epic Chinese story of the Monkey King.

Wolkstein wrote more than 20 books, including The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales (Random House, 1978), Oom Razoon (HarperCollins, 1991), and The Red Lion (Crowell, 1977), all of which were named ALA Notable Books.

Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth (HarperCollins, 1983), which she co-authored with Samuel Noah Kramer, is considered a classic retelling of the great Sumerian epic.

However, though praised as an author, it was Wolkstein’s talent as a storyteller that won her international fame, and many credit her for reviving interest in the art of storytelling fairly early in her career. “The meaning of life is in stories,” she once said. “It is the way I understand life and it is the way I often connect to people.”

In 1967, she was named the New York City Storyteller in recognition of the storytelling events she staged in the parks around the city. In 1972, she began the first graduate storytelling program in the country at Bank Street College.  She was also instrumental in establishing a summer Saturday morning tradition where stories are told at the base of the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park.  Well versed in the Danish storyteller, she authored an article for School Library Journal, “The Finest Quality Dirt,” in 2005 in honor of Andersen’s 200th birthday. During the 2012 season, she performed at the park four times.

A founding member of both America’s National Storytelling Conference and the Storytelling Center of New York City, she was recognized in 2007 when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg named June 22 of that year “Diane Wolkstein Day” in honor of her 40 years of storytelling for the people of NYC.

Wolkstein also taught mythology at New York University for 18 years, hosted the Stories from Many Lands program on NYC public radio for 13 years, and taught the art of storytelling through her many classes, workshops, and conferences.

“She has been a storytelling idol to me and was an inspiration to become one myself as a children’s librarian,” Gretchen Casseroti, assistant director for public services at Darien Library, CT, tells SLJ. “Her gift of bringing the world’s stories to children will be missed.”

Wolkstein was born on November 11, 1942, in New Jersey. She received degrees from Smith College and Bank Street College. She is survived by her daughter, Rachel Zucker, three grandsons, and her mother Ruth, a librarian. A memorial celebrating her life will be planned for later this year.

Looking for a fresh way to create rich educational presentations? Meograph helps users create and share uniquely dynamic interactive projects, incorporating Google Maps and Google Earth to generate a story time line, which can be enhanced with images, video clips, text, audio narration, and links for more in-depth information.

Currently in an early Beta release, Meograph is already a promising way for educators to fashion presentations on any topic where a visual grasp of time and place is central to understanding, making it especially suitable for social studies/history content.

Creating a Meograph presentation is totally intuitive. The Web-based program asks users to answer three basic questions: What happened, when did it happen, and where? It then automatically plots that information on a time line and presents it in chronological order via the viewer’s choice of Google Maps or Google Earth (download required), flying around the globe, displaying where each event took place in time. Creators can add still images or up to 15 seconds of any YouTube video to enhance their story, and record up to 10 seconds of narration from within the browser. To add longer narration, you can record using a third-party app such as Audacity and import the MP3 file. Viewers can elect to watch Meographs in chronological fashion or select points on the time line, hop around, and click “See More” links to further explore a topic.

While the following topic may not be your cup of tea, I chose to get my feet wet with Meograph by creating a presentation on the early roots of punk rock. Electing to begin in 1964—with the formation of the proto-punk band the MC5 in the suburbs of Detroit—I soon had Meograph whizzing over to New York City in the mid 70s, then jetting to London to illustrate how the musical movement cross-pollinated within the next decade and a half, peppering my presentation with band images and album art, plus short concert snippets via YouTube (see video below). Just three weeks old when I tried the application, Meograph enabled me to open a chat window and get prompt responses to my questions and also to provide feedback that, the company says, will inform rapid updates to the new service. Indeed, Meograph seems genuinely eager to hear from early-adopting educators like us.

So you should definitely play with Meograph. It could become a great presentation and project tool that would sure beat static PowerPoints (groan) or, even worse, poster projects (really, just shoot me) as a 21st-century assessment. Sure, thinking in four dimensions (facts, multimedia, interactivity, and context) is tricky, so Meograph is something that may have to be seen to be fully understood and appreciated. That’s why I recommend that you check out a polished sample presentation at meograph.com/demo.

Educators can use Meograph to create presentations that are perfect for sharing on interactive whiteboards, across social networks, or embedded in websites. Easy enough to use, Meograph could also be assigned to secondary students as a medium for research-project assessments in a cutting-edge, Web-based format that combines the viral appeal of both video and infographics in a modern mashup that teens are sure to get excited about.