Introduction to Photo Story

Photo Story is a surprisingly easy and very effective way to blend photographs, music, and voice into an effective presentation. The February 2009 issue of Smart Computing Magazine includes an excellent two-page article which explains the basics.

You can read the article digitally by clicking this link.

One example of a use of Photo Story is the district overview we presented at the opening of our District Accreditation review a year ago. You can view that presentation by clicking here. A second example, entitled "The Faces of Talladega City Schools" can be viewed by clicking here.

Embedding PhotoStory Presentations Using TeacherTube

As more of us become comfortable creating PhotoStory presentations, we may want to look at posting them so they can be viewed by others. In this example, I have taken a PhotoStory we used during District Accreditation and embedded it in this blog post.

I first went to TeacherTube, created a free account, and uploaded the video. The process is simple, although it took the computer several minutes to upload the video. Embedding the video simply involves copying a line of code from TeacherTube and pasting it in the blog post. That may sound Greek, but once you have been shown one time, it's easy.



The video will work best with a high-speed connection. You will find the video will start and stop every few seconds due to our filtering system. Once the video fully downloads once, you could play it from the beginning and have no problem with hesitations.

Photo Story

Nothing spreads a good idea like word of mouth. Two years ago, when Janet Taylor conducted a workshop on Photo Story, probably none of us had heard of it. After teachers were able to see the projects their colleagues who attended had created, last summer's workshop was nearly full.

This Christmas, several of us surprised close family members with projects we had created using Photo Story. I have no doubt that the interest in the program is going to exceed the capacity of the people available to teach it. I have been able to find a pretty good tutorial on the internet, and that link is here.

A novice could use this tutorial and teach himself/herself the program, although half the fun is having someone guide you through the process and help you share in the joy of creating something meaningful and lasting. Whether the project is for your students or a project you create at home for loved ones, this free program is a winner.

Warning—Using this program may cause excessive use of Kleenex.