HKU MITE6323

What I already know
Photostory is a very simple, but effective tool.  I taught Primary 3 students to create digital photo story using the photos taken during their camping with the use of Photostory. The use of pictures, short texts, transitions, different effects and background music really brings fun to children while learning the use of technology to capture their experience at the same time be as creative as they can be to convey their ideas.

What do I want to know
Since we’ve done the storyboard of our assignment, we now have a concrete idea on how to go about to work on it.  Really at this stage I need to practice the use of the Flash and try applying the techniques to start working on my project. 

What have I learnt
Believe it or not, with the digital story assignment, I found a solution for a problem that I’ve encountered at work.  In January, I did a project with the reception children.  They planted beans.  They learnt about the changes took place in growing and learnt about different parts of the plant.  Photos were taken on the plants at different stages.  Then, children were being shown with the photos of the plant. They talked about the plant on the photo and they recorded their talking with the computer as well.  I put together their sound recording along with the pictures they talked about in a PowerPoint.  It was fantastic.  Children enjoyed the process and they learnt about the use of technology to capture their experience.  However, the Powerpoint size is so huge that it makes it impossible for people to download and watch it on the school website.  Now, I’ve a solution to it!  While doing my assignment, I realised I can use Photostory and save it as movie file of 320×240 which can greatly reduce a 60MB file down to just around 6MB!  What a useful thing to learn!

Photostory – Growing Beans
As explained earlier, this digital photo story is mainly done by our school’s reception children (around 4 to 5 years old).  They talked about what they knew about growing plant and different parts of the plant.  With this digital photo story, they are able to share their experience and be able to demonstrate their knowlege and understanding on the topic studied as well as their communication and language skill.   I hope you all enjoy the fruitful learning outcomes of these children. (Oh! when you click to watch the movie, don’t be surprised that you need to scroll  to almost the bottom of the screen before you found the screen showing the ditigal story – technical hiccup!)

http://iln.cite.hku.hk/com/1374/users/sstli/gb320×240.wmv