Learning Photo Story

Using Photo Story is a great way to inspire, introduce and enhance any lesson. Like its name implies, this type of medium allows the user to tell a story in a digital format, using pictures, narration and or music. Made by Microsoft, it's free and can be downloaded off the internet.
It might be simpler to list what Photo Story can't be used for--as the possibilities are vast and wide! It's a high-interest tool that appeals to students whose learning preferences are visual, auditory or both. The combination of pictures with music intrigue emotionally, or leave the viewer curious to know more about the subject at hand. Of the three options presented to us in the technology class I'm taking through Chico State--voice thread, podcast and photo story, I knew I wanted to choose the latter because it seemed the most interesting and looked like a lot of fun.
Putting together the photo story was a blast! I began by selecting photos of Austria off the internet. I wanted to make a presentation to my English students, who at the time, were researching places in the world they would like to travel. All the pictures I selected—whether from sites recommended by technology instructor Glenda Hampton Anderson or otherwise—turned out blurry when I imported them. Could be a pixel problem or because certain sites don’t want their photos to be used. To avoid the blurry issue, I decided to put together a photo story of my students who are embarking on a service learning project. About midway through the story, I realized submission of this story means these students’ images would be on the web. Although I do have permission slips signed on each student, I felt I should talk to each parent so they know exactly where the assignment would end up (on the web, albeit for a college course). I knew a couple of my protective parents would be reluctant. Plus, in addition to already having county approval, I needed district approval, which isn’t easy to get without knowing all parents are on board. So, I decided to come up with a third photo story. My English students will each interview a person of interest who has resided in Modoc County a number of years. The introductory photo story I created—which is intended to inspire them-- included scenic photos around Alturas. These students need practice listening and writing and I thought this lesson plan—where they have to interview someone—would be a good hands-on exercise for them. I used John (Cougar) Mellancamp’s Small Town as background music. It was simply a blast to put together (as was the service learning story) and fun to dabble in photography once again.
By the time I was ready to submit Small Town, I had challenges emailing it (using both my work and personal email accounts) because it was too large. No surprise there. So I downloaded WinZip off the internet and compressed and recompressed. Still too large, I went back into the story to remove some of the photos—which I hated doing—and eventually the size was small enough. With 15 minutes to spare, the story emailed successfully! However, I checked the attachment in my email’s sent file, and a box to buy winzip popped up instead of my story! [I noticed later that someone else in the class had the same result]. I was at a loss as to what to do. I contacted my sister-in-law (who’s technologically savy) and together, we transferred the original photo story to a flash drive and submitted it through her email successfully.
It was good to go through the compression process, but it seems like a waste of effort that you can compress a file only to have it become “corrupted” and therefore unable to send by way of email.
For more information, go to http://photopeach.com/ http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/learnmore/ballew_photostory3.mspx and http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/hiat/tech_quick_guides/photo_story.shtm