Photostory

Potostory

Photo Story from Microsoft is a program or tool that they provide. Microsoft says that the tool should be used to organize photos easy and fun. In which I can agree with Microsoft, it will be more fun and easier. Although I have found other programs/tools I think is simple and good.

It is simple in that way the program helps you through the process of creating animated albums, stories, histories, fairy tales, to name a few. It’s you, the user who sets the limits.

I learned this program a few years ago when the School Board put out a course called PIM. Since then there has happened a lot with the programs and the computers that are used today. In that time there was only one computer in every classroom and one digital camera on the entire school. It took an awful lot of time to carry out a photo story with each student. It usually led to a group assignment and that led to that just only a few students learned how to handle the programs.

Today the situation is completely different. Each student has their own laptop to work in. This means that all students will be more or less experts to handle computers and programs available today. In the case of the world of education, free is a good word, and photo story is a free program. Just go to the Microsoft website and start downloading. Once you have downloaded it, you just have to start working.

You can use photo story in all your subjects but I use it mostly in my Swedish-and English-teaching. Recently we made a job in Swedish where the children were reading different stories. They chose a story and picture set it using the photos they have taken. After that they got to make their own story in the photo story program. They took photos and animated, changing color on them and recorded their reading or wrote a text to the image.
In parallel, we worked with a similar task in English. The difference between the English and the Swedish task was that in the English task they were only allowed to do oral storytelling to the pictures. It's a funny way to practice pronunciation in and they can hear themselves how they pronounce the words. Sometimes they can’t get the image they want without the need to search the internet for one. Since I think it's important that they know the rules for downloading images on the internet I automatically get a lesson in copyright.

Lars Lind