Student+Photo+Story+Project

For the Video and Multimedia course we were assigned three projects: a narrative using Photo Story 3, a video editing project, and create a PSA. All of them were very interesting, but only the Photo Story project was something I could achieve with the resources at my campus. I also really enjoyed the Photo Story project, so I thought my students would too. The program adds movement to still photos and makes them feel more like a movie without the need of expensive video equipment, and enables the presenter to add music or a voice over.

Most of the students really became enthusiastic about the assignment, they worked in partners to report on one of the provinces of Canada. The students were told that the presentations would be posted on the class YouTube page, this may have affected their enthusiasm for the project. At the end of the project, most of the videos were posted on YouTube, though not those that failed to meet the project criteria. Not very many people have commented on the projects, but there have been a few. As we could not go to Canada, students used the internet to locate pictures of their province. They have to find pictures related to certain aspects of the culture such as people, language, and religion. They have to put the pictures in a logical order and add titles to explain the picture. As the computer labs didn’t have microphones students could not record their voice-overs, and had to present the verbal portion live.

I plan on doing this project again next year. My directions and guidelines will be much clearer as I have a better idea of what I want them to take away from the assignment. I will also add the requirement of music or a voice-over as their laptops will be equipped with microphones. The assignment gave students experience editing a story together using pictures and words, and helped them develop skills in internet searching.