Photo Story is a free programme that can be used in various ways in the classroom. In the programme, pictures, music, text and your own voice can be used to do a presentation. Photo Story is a Microsoft programme and can be downloaded on www.microsoft.com to computers with Windows XP. To be able to use Photo Story you need to install Windows Media Player on your computer.
When creating a Photo Story you start by choosing suitable pictures. You can use your own pictures or download them from the Internet. You can then write text to the pictures and add background music. You can also record you own voice to talk about the pictures. When downloading pictures and music it is important to think about the copyright. www.fotofinnaren.se and www.mulitmediabyran.skolverket.se are websites where teachers and pupils can download pictures and music that are to be used for school activities only.
How Photo Story can be used in the classroom
Photo Story is a fun, creative and different way for both pupils and teachers to do a presentation in the classroom. Pupils can for example use Photo Story to do presentations about themselves, about their interests, about their idol or about a book they have read. Teachers can for example use Photo Story to introduce a new theme to their class or to present an assignment.
On my teacher training period I were in a sixth grade class. A year and a half ago, when they were in the fourth grade and had just started to learn English in school, they did a Photo Story in English about themselves. They brought pictures from home and wrote a short text to each picture. Then they recorded what they had written with their own voice. When I were with them this autumn they were going to do new Photo Stories about themselves and they were going to look at their development from fourth grade. They now used new pictures and this time they were going to speak without depending on a text. Then they looked at each other’s Photo Stories and compared them with the first ones they did. They evaluated their use of language and looked at for example pronunciation and vocabulary. This was a fun and instructive way to work with English and a good and encouraging way for the pupils to be aware of their development and their abilities.
The pupils in my class also used Photo Story in their math lessons. When they worked with angles in their math books they took pictures on different angles they found in their homes, in the schoolyard and in the wood. They then talked about the angles, what they were called and where you can find them.
Photo Story is a programme that can be used in many different ways in the classroom and it can be used in many different subjects. Working with photo story is fun, creative and constructive for both pupils and teachers.
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