Digital Storytelling using Microsoft Photo Story

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....

educatorslog.in on YouTube!

Here's a movie I made over the weekend that introduces educatorslog.in and also incorporates video and audio clips of member feedback. It's up on YouTube now...

iMovie is fun to play around with. This is still a work in progress, but I'm pretty pleased with this effort! :)