Microsoft Photo Story

Photo Story is a free download and pretty easy to use.  The students can put together any pictures and add music, or record their voices.  The program includes some music they can add, or they can insert their own sound.  My kids used powerpoint slides converted to jpegs and inserted them as pictures to make stories.  Please note that I teach a bilingual class, so any opportunity I can find for my students to use English in a meaningful way is very important.  My students seemed much less inhibited about speaking English when they got to write or talk for something that others could later review than when they were called on in class.  I don't know why, but it was much more motivational for them.

There is a step by step tutorial on using the program here.

How do I embed Photo Story into my wiki?   You can convert photo story to a wmv once you are finished editing, so that others may view it.  I then just uploaded it using the Insert Plugin as a video.

Examples

This is an example of a story done for a kindergarten class by one of my students.  By the way, the Rest in Peace part is a reminder about being safe in the Science Lab.

Educational Uses

•   These can be used in language arts and other content areas to create videos for others.  I used them in language arts, but they can be used to describe science concepts, social studies, and many others.
•   My class also did a video for the 4th grade class of what to expect in our 5th grade classroom and presented it to them at the end of the year.  It was kind of a summary of what we did all year long.
• The University of Houston hosts a Web page on digital storytelling that includes a number of educational applications for Photo Story 3 (and similar software). The site has goals and objectives, tutorials, samples, evaluation rubrics, etc. It is a wonderful resource if you wish to try a digital story project with students using Photo Story 3.