Tech Tips for the Week of October 26th - Photostory

This Week's Tip:  Photostory 3

An old adage cautions that "There's no such thing as a free lunch."  Like all truisms and generalizations, this one is only partially true.  Certainly, in the realm of computer software, there are many quality products available for free.  Last week's Tech Tips focused on free software to protect your computer from viruses.  This week's free software recommendation takes us in a completely different direction - creating a photo slideshow.




Photostory 3 is a free download from Microsoft.  (Yes, you read that right: Free and Microsoft used in the same sentence.)  Not only is it free, but it is an excellent example of the delicate balance between power and ease of use that so few software packages achieve.  Photostory allows anyone to create professional-looking picture slideshows and accompany them with music, voice-over narration, and text in a matter of a few mouse clicks.  When I say anyone, I do mean anyone.  The Elearning team has done a number of successful projects with students as young as grade one.  In fact, the voice-over narration is perfect for younger students to comment on their slideshow.

Here are some of the admirable features of Photostory:

• Simple Import:  Photo importing is an easy batch process. Upon import, Photostory automatically creates a slide for each photo.
  
• Simple Process:  Photostory walks the user through the slideshow creation process in a linear, logical, step-by-step manner, yet it allows him/her to return to a previous step at any time without losing work performed at later stages.
• Intelligent Defaults:  Very often the user can click through several of the steps and simply accept the program's defaults.
• Animation:  By default, Photostory applies the Ken Burns Effect to add animation (panning, zooming, ...) to the still photographs, thereby conferring a certain cachet of professionalism to the simplest of presentations.  The user can accept these default animations, or he/she can exercise full control over them.
• Music Generation:  While it is possible to add music from an external source, Photostory includes its own MIDI music generator, which students enjoy working with.  Again, this allows even the youngest students to add music to their presentation, if desired.
• Built-in Voice-Over Recorder:  The built in voice recorder enables even the youngest students the ability to narrate their photo story without having to resort to outside applications.
  
• Single file generation:  The end product in Photostory is a single movie file, which can be transferred or viewed in a number of ways.  Alternatively, it can be incorporated into Movie Maker for further editing or enhancement.  In this way, it's possible to assemble projects from a number of students into a single move file.

Most people who use Photostory for the first time are so pleasantly surprised at the ease of use and the quality of the end product that they quickly forego PowerPoint as a means of creating photo slide shows.

Online Video Tutorials

Photostory is so easy to use that many of you will need little help with it.  Nevertheless, the Elearning team has assembled a number of step-by-step video tutorials to make it easier for anyone to dive in.  (Log in as guest)  If you would prefer booking one of the Elearning team to work with you and your students the first time through, you can access their calendars on the Tech Tips Blog.

Curriculum Applications

Photo slideshows can be adapted to support many curriculum-based activities.  Here are just a few examples:

• Social Studies 3:  Have students take pictures of buildings, activities and people within the community and create a slideshow about their community.
• Social Studies 4:  Have students take or find pictures of various aspects of life in Saskatchewan (geography, economy, wildlife, recreation, ...) and assemble a slideshow about their province.  Or, the teacher can provide all or some of the pictures and have the student arrange them in appropriate categories for the slideshow.
• Health/Guidance (many grade levels):  Picture slideshows present a number of opportunities for students to examine themselves and/or their relationship with others.  They can create slideshows emphasizing their own uniqueness, their own image or self-concept, or their family or friends.  Students can use Inspiration to plan these presentations by examining the elements which comprise their self-concept or the attributes which make them unique.
  
• Science:  Students can document a Science experiment by taking photos at various stages and then explaining the hypothesis, the process, and the outcome(s) of the experiment.
• ELA:  Student can take still images of a story they wish to narrate, then assemble those images and perform a voice-over to narrate the story.
• Arts Education:  Students can create a video portfolio of their artistic efforts by shooting still images of their work, then assembling them in Photostory complete with voice-over commentary/explanation.

Again, these are just some suggestions to get the creative juices flowing.  I'm sure many of you will think of others.  Please feel free to share those with us.

Next Week:  Photo searching on the Internet - the Legal Way.  Everyone is familiar with searching for photos in Google Images; however, the use of many of these images is actually not legal.  Next week's tech tip will examine how you and your students can find and use images with a clear conscience.

Until next week ...