We all have stories to tell and our stories help us all connect with each other. Your libraries, schools, students and communities have stories to share too.
This is a selection of easy to use tools can help tell stories through photos, voice, video and music. Great for student projects and after school activities. These would also be great tools to cover in a technology series for the public and have them create their own stories to share. Let your creative spirit, imagination and memories loose!
Used creatively, PowerPoint can be be a powerful storytelling tool. Take a look at this example of a PowerPoint that breaks all the rules, from Joyce Valenza.
http://voicethread.comVoicethread is an online service creates a slide show with narration and text notes. Use for student book reviews with their own drawings and narration. Student created stories with photos or drawings. Narrated slide shows of community events. Book talks.
Upload pictures
Record narration directly to the slide show with your microphone and/or write text notes to go with each slide
Allow others to leave audio or text notes in your presentation.
Shows can be embedded in other web pages by copying and pasting a bit of code.
Some voicethread examples:
This is Brazil - High school students introducing cities in Brazil.
http://animoto.comAnimoto is an easy to use tool to create photo & music video stories. This would be a fun project for an art class. Or to create a video representing how you feel about a book or movie.
Upload your images, pick from selected music clips and let Animoto create a 30 second video for you for free.
You can also grab your photos from popular photosharing sites like flickr, etc. (Search for photos licensed under Creative Commons)
And you can upload your own music as well. You could try creating and uploading your own narration as the "music" file.
Animoto automatically creates some pretty cool transitions and effects for your photos.
If you don't like the result, click on "remix" for another version. The video will change with the type of music selected. (see examples below)
Easy to copy code to embed the videos in your web pages, in facebook, myspace and other popular sites.
Cost
Free: Make as many 30 second videos as you like
$3: for each full length video.
$30: create an unlimited number of full length videos for a year. Videos are still available if you let your membership expire.
Cindi Trainor (Eastern Kentucky U) did a great animoto video with photos of library staff. Fun to embed on a web page or research guides page to show students/patrons what you all look like.
Mix graphics, photos, videos, music and text into "glogs". Virtual posters. I haven't used this much yet, but have been seeing some really great uses - posters to promote services, announce events, project presentations and more. Take a look at some examples and think how you could use this free tool.
Examples:
New Tools Workshop - Joyce Valenza used a glog to create a fun start page outlining the content for the workshop day. (Tons of great tools on her wiki!)
Itzak Stern - glog presentation for a film class. Note the embedded music (click on the top right)
If you have slides in a powerpoint presentation, upload them to SlideShare to share them with the world. SlideShare now has a feature to synchronize an audio file with your slides. I you have a presentation to share with your community or your students have already created PowerPoint based stories, this is a great place to make them available. (The audio needs to be recorded and hosted separately.)
Kathryn Greenhill's slide show on "What is Web 2.0" is a great example of slides and synchronized audio.
Joyce Valenza mentions it in a recent blog post and has an example on her blog. I haven't tested it yet, but it looks like a ton of fun. Watch this video to see how it works. Pick from tons of backgrounds and characters, add motions and action, thought balloons or your own voice, upload photos and more. You can create multiple scenes as well. Somehow I'm having a vision of kids creating their own versions of a Shakespeare play, with unusual settings and characters.
State Library of Queensland -- Queensland Stories -- "Queensland Stories is the State Library of Queensland’s project to collect and display Queensland digital stories; stories about your community, your house, a special person, your favourite place, or things you love to do."
Digital Storytelling Station - San Diego Public Library -- "Stories help define who we are and how we fit into the world we live in. the Digital Storytelling Station gives you an opportunity to spotlight something you deeply care about and will be available for others to see and hear."
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