I think PhotoStory is the best free tool for digital storytelling on Windows. I find it easier to use than either version of iMovie on the Mac, by far. There are some drawbacks -- it's not possible to export directly to a Mac-compatible format, and there's a confusing point in the process when you've uploaded your images and there's a window overlaying the image that says, "Place your text here." Usually you don't want to place text over images, unless they are titles or intros or chapter markers, or the words are essential to the image. So it's important to remember that you don't HAVE to type in the box--if you leave it blank and just move to the next step, your image will stand alone.
The drawbacks I know about using PhotoStory:
1) Only still images. To include video on the free Windows editors, one needs to use MovieMaker, and I don't know how MovieMaker handles stills. I've been told to avoid MovieMaker as difficult and quirky.
2) Hard to start with the audio, but I just found a blog post that indicates it's possible: from the comments at the bottom of this page:
http://langwitches.org/blog/2008/05/09/digital-storytelling-part-iii-photostory/
Her excellent tutorial is also posted as a downloadable .pdf file, and I will link it in the sidebar.
But it's really not necessary to prepare the audio separately beforehand. If the story has been storyboarded, and the script is marked up into sections to correspond with the images, you can use the recording feature within the program. This method has the advantage that the time the image is displayed automatically adjusts to the length of the voice-over that you record.
To download the free Photostory 3 Microsoft software for Windows XP users here is the link.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/PhotoStory/default.mspx
is there a way to record my students voices using a digital voice recorder and later add to photo story?
September 24th, 2008 at 6:48 am
@Lavenda mccommon
Yes there is a way to upload your voice. Treat your voice recordings, which have to be a .wma, .mp3 or .wav file, as a music file and browse for them on the hard drive. You will have to play with the length of each photo later to make it fit the length of the recordings.