Digital Imagery and collaborative projects

The use of digital imagery is becoming increasingly popular in everyday classroom teaching and learning. Students use images from the internet to create new information while teachers make use of tools such as powerpoint to create effective presentations. The use of images in telling stories is an opportunity which creates motivation and enhances learning. The ease with which can take images using mobile phones provides us with an opportunity to create exciting learning content.

Task 1: Getting started

This first task is designed to support you to discuss with your partner your project highlights. What are the key parts of the projects. Can you describe your project in 20 words. To help you do this, there is a nice tool which will help you create a visual map of project.

1. Open MS word and type 20 words which sum up your project

2. Copy and paste into Wordle

3. Next press the "Prt Scr" button on the keyboard. This will copy the wordle into the clipboard. Paste that into Powerpoint and later embed that into your e-languages portal.

See example of a Wordle

Task 2: Digital storytelling

Digital story telling is a good way to articulate your project. Also, you can engage your students using this approach. For this first task, you will learn how to develop a digital story using a number of approaches. the first one is using PhotoStory 3.

Photostory 3 is a package which can download free from the internet and will run on most school systems and is easy to install. It has already been installed on the machines you are working on.

Lets get started:

1. Go to the internet and download at least 10 images which reflect your project. For images you can go Google or any other search engine. Just make sure that to get medium size images to get a good quality end-product

2. Create a photostory. There are many tutorials which help you to get started. Try the links below and do not be afraid to experiment!

• Help 1 (online tutorials from microsoft)
• Help 2 (word document to print)
• Help 3 (website)
  

3. Now create a powerpoint slide and insert that into your story

4. Finally, add music, text, transitions, effectsetc to complete your master piece

5. Now that you have completed your story, you might want to share with colleagues. Sign up for a free google account. Upload your video and then share this with the rest of the world. Give it a go. You can also embed any video created in Photostory into a blog as done below.

Task 3: Digital storytelling on-line

Now that you have completed telling a story, you can create a 30 second story on-line using a free web 2.o service called Animoto.

1. Sign up for an account
2. Create a story using images which might have saved for task 1 or any other
3. Once you have created a story, share that with a colleague
4. Try and see if you can embed that story into the E-languages portal

Example shown below

Task 4: My journey through your eyes

For this activity, use powerpoint to create a simple collaborative project. This project can develop language skills, Geography, History etc. The possibilities are endless and you are only limited by your imagination

Here are the simple steps. Try it out!

1. Write a short script covering roughly 5-10 images (these will become slides) which describes a 5 day holiday trip through any country (for example, on the first day we travelled 50 miles to visit the historic city of Agra etc)

4. Open Microsoft PowerPoint and go to "slide show" and "record narration". Record your narration into PowerPoint. (INSERT- MOVIES AND SOUNDS - RECORD SOUND)

5. Imagine that this will now be sent across via e-mail to a partner school in another country. Their task is to find images which link with your narration to complete an audio-visual PowerPoint presentation. For this activity swap yours with a colleague in the room with you.

6. Now complete the activity using the file you have received from your colleague and produce a PowerPoint with narration and images.

7. You have just developed your first collaborative project! See example

8. You could create a simple Flash animation from your powerpoint by using the really cool applications from i-Spring. See how the example above has been converted into a Flash animation. Here is an good example:

Created in powerpoint

Converted into Flash using iSpring. Click on Video below

Task 5: Tags, images and much more

For this activity, you will explore some really good image sharing, manipulation on-line services.

1. Sign up for a free Flickr account

2. Search for pictures which are copyright free and you could use in your project

3. Upload your own pictures and share with colleagues

4. Upload a video (you could upload your Photostory)

5. Leave comments on some of the images uploaded on Flickr

6. Use Splashr to see how you could extract images from Flickr in a simple way

7. Finally, exolore how you could bring any images you might have uploaded to Flickr to create a comic strip, print and share with the world. Click on Bubblr and explore!