Sunday, April 4, 2010

Thing #21 Podcasts and Videocasts

I've always wanted to learn how to create a Photostory. Our team uses it every year to display pictures from our "Pay it Forward" project. This year our project was called "Stuffed with Love". We asked the parents of our Kindergarteners to donate a new stuffed animal and we took over 200 stuffed animals to local hospitals, fire stations and police stations to give to children in crisis.

My first attempt at creating a Photostory videocast was not without challenges. I don't have a microphone at home so I decided to put in text slides instead of narration. Photostory doesn't have a feature to add a blank slide but I found a wiki online entitled "Blank Slide Instructions for Photostory" that gave explicit instructions. When I was ready to add music, I thought that Photostory had music that I could use without worrying about copyright, but for some reason I couldn't figure out how to do it. So I did a "Google" search for "Creative Commons Music" and found dig.ccmixter which is a website full of music safe for podcasts. I chose the music I wanted and copied it to my music folder. After that it was easy to add to my Photostory.

So here's the final product of the Life Cycle of a Butterfly:


5 comments:

  1. What a great photostory! Neat idea to use with kids. Thanks for sharing.

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  2. I really like the music and will take a look at the site...not sure I know about it.
    I do want to be sure you do find the music that is contained within PS so take another look..if you simply move forward, you should have come upon a screen for adding music...but we will make sure during class that you find it.

    Also, if you choose to add narration, you know you can go bak and add it to the working copying (wp3 version) and then simply save a final copy again (wmv) ...PS is so adaptive isn't it!!

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  3. Thanks for the mention of dig.ccmixter as a resource for music! It's nice that they have both instrumental and vocal music available and will be fun to explore.

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  4. I struggled with my Photostory, and I wished I had read your blog earlier. Thanks for sharing the tips on the music and the narration. I put text on top of my pictures, and they blurred the words. Next time I will do what you did with the narration. Beautiful Photostory!

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  5. What a great photo story!Wonderful...

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