I've talked a fair bit about getting kids to engage in creative storytelling using the myriad digital tools we have at our disposal today. For the Digital Storytelling workshops I conducted for middle school kids this past academic year, I decided to go with Microsoft Photo Story (freely downloadable) instead of Windows Movie Maker (also freely available). The school does not use Macs else iMovie would've been my hands-down choice.
Photo Story is a simple, easy-to-learn tool that puts together images, with transitions, and background sound which could be music or even voice-overs recorded in Photo Story itself.
Even though the kids spent some time picking up a little bit of Adobe Photoshop (which now has a free "express" web version...yay!) for basic cropping and image manipulation, and Audacity for sound recording and mixing (also an open source free Audio Editor :)), in the end all the students used Photo Story alone to put together their images, cool transitions, music and voice-overs to produce (with very little effort) some fantastic digital stories.
Powerpoint is passe, people, movies and digital stories are the new forms of show-n-tell!
Don't just take my word for it ... see for yourself one 11-year old 6th grader's sweet digital story....
3 comments:
Photo Story was one of best free tools from Redmond but too bad, they discontinued it in Vista.
That is a shame! One more reason to not migrate to Vista, I guess...
Here's a great blog post on The Power of Digital Storytelling. I would add http://storycenter.org to Alix's list of links and resources for Digital Storytelling.
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