Digital Storytelling for Educators

Good Digital Stories:

Are personal: The narrator is encouraged to personalize the tale, making it clear how the people or events in the story impacted his or her life.

Begin with the story/script: Creators are expected to narrow in on their story, writing and even recording their script before they ever begin digitizing images, importing sound effects, or using video editing tools. Jason Ohler, points out that having students "create and tell stories before they [get] to use all the empowering and distracting technology at their disposal" is an important way to avoid "enabling the technophile at the expense of the story teller in...students."

Are concise: Typically, a digital story will run from two to five minutes in length. The goal is to narrow the story down to a single "nugget" — one central idea or message.

Use readily-available source materials: Many digital stories rely heavily on photographs, hand-drawn illustrations, and other scanned-in images, along with transition effects, to accompany the recorded narrative.

Include universal story elements: Good stories — digital or not — include essential elements such as conflict, transformation, and closure. Furthermore, they are told in a way that allows the audience to, as Ohler puts it, "identify with them, remember them, and be changed by them."

Involve collaboration: Participants in the group project give and receive feedback on their stories and scripts.

adapted from Wikibooks

Basically any program where photo and/or movies can be edited and have sound and music added. Even a combination of programs (create slides in PPT, save them as jpgs or gifs, and import them into Photo Story; create your Photo Story movie and add effects, sounds, titles in Movie Maker).

Stop Motion Animator - (Free download) Use a web cam to capture the pictures, save as an avi file, and then use a Movie editor (like Movie Maker or iMovie) to add background voices and music.

VideoSpin from Pinnacle - free to use (but they would love it if you bought their premium version) and a hefty download (148mb).

There is probably going to be a need to do some simple photo editing to some of your pictures you add to your digital story. So here are a couple of free options. It isn't PhotoShop or The GIMP, but for free and simple you can't beat these (actually GIMP is free but learning curve like PhotoShop).

IrfanView	(Free)	Mainly a viewer that will also do some effects, crop, resize, and convert digital picts to other formats.
Picasa	(Free)	Google's software that will organize your pictures, crop, resize, fix color, add effects...
Picnik	(Free and online)	Good program to do simple edits of your pictures online. No software to download. Just upload your picture, make your edits, and save back to your desktop. video tutorial on using Picnik by Janetta Garton
Splashup	(Free and online)	Good program to do simple edits of your pictures online. No software to download. Just upload your picture, make your edits, and save back to your desktop.
Phixr	(Free and online)	Another online program.
Paint.NET	(Free)	Intended as a replacement for Windows paint, it has become a free rival to other photo editors. Windows only
PhotoScape	(Free)	Download the software to use the viewer, converter, editor, gif animator, collage templates, and batch editor (the C/Net download seemed to work better for me so I am linking there instead of www.photoscape.org ).
Photoshop Express	(free and online)	Brand new online editor. However, you do have to create an account and sign in, but you get 2 GB of storage space. So this might not be the best one to use with kids since they could potentially see something in the galleries section they should not see.

FreeFoto.com - free for educational use, copy and paste bibliography for pictures
Pics4learning - free for educational use, copy and paste bibliography for pictures
DiscoverySchool's Clip Art Gallery
DK Clip art
FindSounds.com - search for wave, au, and aiff sound files. (Some school web filters may block the page the sound is found on therefore preventing download.)