Ease of Use-Photostory vs.Voice Thread

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Permalink Reply by Michael Zimmer on December 7, 2009 at 8:30am

You can also try http://animoto.com/education - It is free and does all the transitions for you. Text only goes between photos though. Once you create an account you get a code to provide so students get full access.

You can also try http://photopeach.com

Visit my blog, I did a write up about both of them. http://edutechintegration.blogspot.com

The benefit of Voicethread, no download and web-based. You might need an email address though to create an account

Photostory can be downloaded which is great, if they have access to the Internet, unless it is installed on your computer.

You could have kids record their voice over, but they would need a secluded area, or they will get tons of background noise. The voice recording feature means no audacity.

I don't know if you can argue one over the other. You could offer all four to your students and then let them choose which to use.

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Permalink Reply by Chris Mooney on December 7, 2009 at 9:08am

Thanks. I used Animoto last year. It went fairly well for historical interpretations/research. I'll take a look at peach and your blog. Thanks for the assistance.

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Permalink Reply by Kev on December 7, 2009 at 7:42pm

Voice thread is much easier for recording voice since you can do it by phone among other things. Photostory gets the jobs done but I'd definitely look at Voicethread first.

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Permalink Reply by Angela Mitchell on December 8, 2009 at 10:39am

I have used Photostory and I find it's great with my students...I have never used Voice thread, but you can try photostory..you will like it

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Permalink Reply by Drew McAllister on December 8, 2009 at 10:54am

I think either of these could be a good solution for you. A couple things come to mind:

Voicethread:
Pros -- authentic audience, discussion-focused, embeddable projects
Cons -- usually requires e-mail addresses for registration or the $60 yearly educator's subscription (though definitely worth the cost, imho), not "portable" in a technical sense (you can't download the projects, though that's available in a limited number with the educator's subscription, or you could use a screen capture product)

Photostory:
Pros -- easy interface, recording on each slide, customized transitions, students can easily lay a musical track below their narration at the last step, no registration required (though you might need your tech guys to install it on your school's PCs), free
Cons -- not discussion-oriented, not web-based so you may need to do a work-around in order to embed the results on your web site, though the final products may be shown to an audience, there's no "native", "beyond the classroom" authentic audience for the finished product

Good luck, and let us know what you decide on!

--Drew

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Permalink Reply by Chris Mooney on December 10, 2009 at 7:08am

Thanks. I think I'll be tackling PhotoStory. I tried Windows Movie Maker in the past, but it seems to be a bit unfriendly (lots of red x marks). Thanks everyone.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Zimmer on December 10, 2009 at 12:05pm

your red X's are because whereever you originally uploaded the pictures or clips from is no longer where you are working on the project...if that makes sense....For example

Say you took the pictures originally from "My Doucments" but then saved your Movie Maker project to your Jumpdrive. Well, in order for Movie Maker to work, those same pictures had to be put on the Jumpdrive...or originally loaded from the Jumpdrive in order for Movie Maker to locate the files. Does that make sense?

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Permalink Reply by suehellman on December 13, 2009 at 9:09am

It's always a good idea when creating multimedia productions to bundle the project file and the media files together in one folder so they can be easily found again. Even with PowerPoint, if you don't bundle sound, video, or flash files with the final product, it will not play on another machine.

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