PhotoStory

For this assignment I created a presentation using Microsoft PhotoStory. PhotoStory is just what it sounds like; it allows you to use your pictures to tell a story. The program provides many options to customize the pictures, and you can even turn your story into an educational lesson by combining it with Microsoft PowerPoint like I did below.





For this assignment I took our Google Maps activity and created a "part two" so to speak, by creating a visual itinerary of some of the literary sites we would see when touring Massachusetts. First, I created a PowerPoint presentation of images representing each literary landmark. I saved the files as .JPEG files and transferred them to PhotoStory where I created voice narration for each slide. One of the many advantages of PhotoStory is the option to set a timer for each slide to keep presentations brief. With the twenty second timer set, I narrated the history of each image/slide. Once I finished creating my PhotoStory, I uploaded the movie to Youtube so I could embed it into this blogpost and obtain a URL to share with the public.

I thought this activity was really difficult and time consuming, but I'm glad that I did it because I learned a lot about videos and embedding, which are two subjects I didn't know anything about prior to this. For me, one of the hardest parts was figuring out to embed this video into my blog, even after I read many online tutorials. I switched the view to HTML, but despite what all of the tutorials said, you do not simply "copy and paste" (or at least that didn't work for me). You still have to know a bit about actual HTML codes to get it to work, because I figured out that it only works after putting "< br /> " before and after the video, which none of the tutorials told me. Oh well, now I know!