Photo Story

This activity involved creating a video from a slide presentation using a program called Photo Story for Windows.  Let’s back up a minute. Before I could use Photo Story, I had to create a PowerPoint presentation in order to use the slides as pictures for this narrative video.  The presentation I created is called “Canning Tomatoes”. So naturally, the video is about canning home grown tomatoes.

After I created the slides, I downloaded Photo Story and began my journey as the director, editor and creator of a video about canning tomatoes. Photo Story was extremely easy to use. I was able to upload my slides right into the program and started to add voice and other formatting like duration of time the slide was seen by the viewer. What I really liked about this program was that I could type in notes into a box and use those as a guide for my speaking parts. It was like a small cheat window in case you didn’t quite know what to say when creating the audio for a particular slide. I also liked the fact that each slide had its individual recording as opposed to the recordings that are continuous and if you make a mistake you have to start over. I only had to redo a couple of slides when I was editing my work.

Next I had to save the video and upload it to YouTube. It was kind of scary to think that I would have something on YouTube that anyone could see. I went ahead and logged in with my student id (which is linked to YouTube) and successfully uploaded my video to anyone interested in canning tomatoes. The video can be seen at Canning Tomatoes via YouTube  

I really enjoyed creating this video about canning tomatoes. This activity complies with the ISTE.NETS.T standard number 3, Model Digital-Age Work and Learning. Since this activity communicates relevant information and ideas to others, this is a prime example of digital-age work and learning. I think this type of activity would be good for anyone to practice articulation, giving directions, creating narratives and even just sharing what they know.