Creating a story with photos

Story writing is not new. In subjects like English, writing stories has been a part of the curriculum for many years. A picture speaks a thousand words. Creating a story with photos adds more value than the text in its own. Sometimes a series of photos on its own conveys a lot of information to the reader.       It enables learners to create – this draws upon their higher order thinking skills (Blooms Taxonomy). Until recently, embedding photos in stories was challenging. Photos had to be taken and processed before they could be used. Sometimes if the photos were unsuitable, then the whole process had to be repeated. ICT has made this a lot easier. There are a variety of software applications that can be used to create digital stories with photos. For Mac user’s – imovie can be used for this purpose. For PC’s, Microsofts Photo Story 3 can be very effective. It is a free download from the Microsoft Download Centre. Here is an example of a Photo Story on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3ov5F4PlPg

Creating a digital story with Microsoft Photo Story 

1. When you open the Photo Story 3 program open, you will see the following screen
2. Choose “Begin a story” and click “Next”. On the next page, choose the images from the folder they are stored. You can choose up to 300 images for your story. (In this case I am using just one image – for a story you will need a minimum of 8-10.)
3. Once you have chosen your images, click “Next”. On the the screen which follows, you can change effects, add captions, and tiles to your story. Click next when you are done.
4. On this screen, you can narrate your pictures, customise motion (i.e. change slide transition times) and preview your story. Most laptops and desktops have some recording option – so narrating photos should easy to do. As previously click next when you are done.
5. On this screen you can add music. A good option here could to be record songs sung by student or music created by them as the background. You can also choose on board music (i.e. music which is already embedded with the program).  To do this click on the create music option.
6. The next screen finishes your production by saving it as a .wmv file. On this screen you can make adjustments to the size of the .wmv file. Once completed, the file can be copied onto a DVD – it will then play on any DVD player.