I’d seen this resource a while back and like many things, it slipped off the memory shelf for a while.However, I was working in a school this week on Digital Story telling and the usual fallbacks of Photo Story and Movie Maker were palying up on the netbooks. We used Revelation Sight and Sound for a week and this was fine, but it did put the netbooks under some stress when the stories ran to a few slides and the pupils got enthusiastic with the transitions!
Anyway, I was looking for something totally unrelated to this on the web when Picture Teller popped up and how glad I was that it did. Free,( though if you don’t get your web connection via your LA/RBC, it might not be in the future), PT has elements of Photo Story and Movie Maker in it, though missing some features. However, there’s a pretty good argument to say that the lack of extensive editing options in the software is a positive as it does mean that the children focus on the writing rather than the random use of effects that general
ly detract from the work.
It has the ability to zoom and pan and add sound- uploaded or recorded directly into the presentation- and titles and subtitles can be added. You can add your own pictures, obviously, but it has an impressive collection of images in the online gallery available.
Pupils need to register and when completed, their presentations can be saved, downloaded, linked to or embedded into the school website or Learning Platform and because it on the web, they can get at it out of school too.
A replacement for Photo Story and Movie Maker? Possibly not totally, but certainly something to add to the Digital Story telling software armoury. Give it a whirl. The Y3 class I was with loved it.
The only downside I can think of is that it is Flash-based, so unless you know of a sneaky workaround, it won’t work on your iPad.
