Presentation Help Needed - PowerPoint?

I have four classes of fourth graders each making minislides (2 max per child). One group is doing faces in astronomy and the other is doing events in astronomy for a family potluck. I am planning to stich them all together (2 separate presentations - faces and then event) with their voiceovers and music in the background.

Here are the problems I am having -

- Students have some experience with powerpoint so that would be the easiest and less time consuming to do. However, I can not maintain music in the background when the students do their voice over. Does anyone know how to do?

- Then I went over to movie maker but it won't upload from powerpoint. In my test run I saved the slides as a screen shot and then put it into paint and saved it as a picture (which then let me upload to movie maker). That seemed cumbersome and I thought there must be a better way (movie maker would only let me upload movies or pictures not files).

Any suggestons?

Eve Heaton
Mossy Oaks Elementary School
Beaufort, SC
www.mrsheatonsclass.com
www.mrsheatonsclass

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Permalink Reply by Dave Selover on March 20, 2009 at 6:37am

here is one solution: http://www.dvd-ppt-slideshow.com/ppt-to-dvd-tips/import-powerpoint-... I have not tried it yet, but you could grab digital photo's of the people in astonomy of the picture gallery through I believe the online library resource of new york public library or the smithsonian

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Permalink Reply by Ross on March 20, 2009 at 7:50am

You could try Photostory: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/PhotoSt...

It is a free download from microsoft, and allows you to run a slideshow with voiceover and music. It is very simple to use. You can have voiceover that is just for a particular picture or slide, and it will time out the length of the slide for you.

In the last step, it creates your slideshow into a .wmv video file that will playback like a movie.

You can save each slide in your powerpoint projects as .jpg, which can then be imported in to photostory. This is under save as> other formats.

By default it changes slides with effects or sweeps, which you, if you want to, can turn off for each slide.

For your needs, I'd highly recommend trying this one out.

-Ross

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Permalink Reply by Mendy Gannon on March 20, 2009 at 5:22pm

Save the powerpoints as jpegs - click file - save as - jpegs and then you can easily put those in movie maker/photostory - I did it for the open house presentation.

Family potluck? Do tell!

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Permalink Reply by Elena on March 20, 2009 at 9:13pm

What I have done with the voice over and music is used the free software Audacity. They record their voice and import either a wav or mp3 file under their voice. They can adjust the music so that it doesn't overpower their voice. We got our music from Freeplaymusic.com. They export the entire file as a wav file that works in either movie maker ppt or most any program.

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Permalink Reply by Jill B on March 26, 2009 at 11:57pm

Eve, Audacity might be what you would need. It's a free program that district has allowed us to download. It allows you to record your voice and music in the background and save it as a mp3 file. I hope this helps.

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Permalink Reply by Eve Heaton on March 27, 2009 at 2:25am

Used Mendy's suggestion and it worked like a charm. All students made their slides in PowerPoint and then saved them as a jpeg instead of powerpoint. I was then able to load them to Photostory and add music and their voice. They are turning out great. I have four presentations all together - one class did faces in astronomy, another people in space, another dates in space, and the last a A to Z astronomy primer. This was all in conjunction with a mini grant we recieved for build-it-yourself telescopes in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy (2009).

I have nearly three classes done and hope to have the rest done today so then I can start worring about the actually potluck details.

Thanks for the help!