Monday 21 July 2008

Digital Storytelling with Photostory

At a recent regional E-Guides Refresher event, staff from around 45 Work Based Learning organisations were shown how digital storytelling can be used to enhance the learning experience. Photostory was demonstrated and was a great tool to use for this purpose. Not only because it’s free, but because its also very easy to get up and running with.

Photostory can be used to:

· Create slideshows using sets of digital photos that are then saved as short videos. These videos can then be watched on your TV, a computer, or a Windows Mobile–based portable device.

· Add special effects, soundtracks, and your own voice narration to photo stories. Then personalize them with titles and captions.

This is a great tool to use to enhance digital images that are captured and used by learners and as a way to engage them with digital media. The finished articles can also be a nice keepsake - finished videos can be distributed on a CD, uploaded to a web page, an e-portfolio or saved to other storage devices.

Of course, Photostory can also be used by training staff to create engaging electronic resources that use illustrations to get a point across.

It’s also worth noting that Photostory doesn’t need a video camera or any existing digital video recordings – just your digital photographs. This makes it a great tool to use to take still images to the next level with no cost and very little expertise.

Recently our National Work Based Learning Co-ordinator used Photostory to easily create a short video which talked about the possibilities for e-learning in the Work Based learning sector. This is very useful as the video itself also highlights a number of other useful (and free) tools that can be used for e-learning.

Here's another short video that will show how you can set up a Photostory yourself.

Microsoft’s Photo Story is available for free download from the Microsoft web site or for a guide on how to use the software click here. Hope its useful (and that if you create your own Photostory do let me know what you think of it…!)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There is also a pretty good guide to digital storytelling on the BBCs website at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/audiovideo/sites/about/pages/howto.shtml

This includes tips for how to get the best digital photos to put in your digital story or video.

Anonymous said...

Photostory is much easier to use than MMaker, but have you also considered some of the tools in flickr or esnips. THese offer simple slideshow functionalities.

kev B.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the tip Kev B. Yes, there are several tools out there that can be used for digital storytelling now aren't there. Too many to mention I expect!

I also like the look of several of the free tools that are being made available for freely publishing digital books on the web (blurb and issuu to name just a few).

http://www.blurb.com/
http://issuu.com/
http://www.lulu.com/uk/

Now just need to find the time to play with them all!

Cheers,

T-