Thing Twenty-One: Podcasts and Vidcasts

This is a digital story I made for writing with art in the classroom. So many times students say, "I don't know what to write about!" With something like this you will hopefully inspire them with pictures. They can create a story that goes with what they see in the picture, or perhaps the mood of the picture will inspire them. Whatever it is, hoepfully by having a visual their little brains will start thinking of things to write about. I find photostory to be an easy tool to use for the classroom, and in the classroom. It is fairly easy for students to pick up this skill and as long as you do your research in advance, for pictures and information, and write your script before you begin to record, the actual making of a vidcast is pretty simple. As a mac user I was sad to see that there is not a downloadable photostory for us. We do have imovie, but the process is a little different. You will most likely have this question as some of your students will want to work on this at home, but might only have a mac, sadly you will have to tell them that it is not available...boo hoo. You might want to work a little bit in advance to come up with some direction sheets for both photostory and imovie, especially if your campus, in SBISD, has the new mac notebooks. I'm looking forward to watching the vidcasts you produced! Happy blogging! P.S. Here is something I created in a summer school course on Art in Education, this one has the voice over as well as pictures.