Digital Poetry
I’ve been collaborating with a 9th grade English teacher on a digital poetry project for the past two weeks. Students are creating found poems from To Kill a Mockingbird then coverting their poems into a video using PhotoStory. The videos will be uploaded to Schooltube where students at Mauldin High School (teacher has set up an exchange) will view the poems, along with the rest of the world.
On Friday I was able to use a few web 2.0 tools and wanted to share.
Flora had a Club Fair Friday during lunch. I went out and took pictures and uploaded them to Picasa, but I also copied them to a file on my desktop to use for PhotoStory, where I created the video.
Getting Started. I opened Photostory, a free download on Microsoft.com and followed the directions for importing pictures from the folder on my desktop. Holding down CTRL let me pick more than one at a time to do a batch upload. Because of time, I left the default movements and transitions but did add text “Club Fair” on the first photo.
Adding Music. Last year we purchased Soundzabound in CD form. I wished we would have purchased the online library, instead. Because the files were in a format that wouldn’t import into Photostory, I converted them to “wma” files. To do this I ripped the tracks from the CD using Windows Media Player which automatically turned them into “wma” files. This put the tracks in the library which can be found in “My Documents” “My Music” then in a folder with the artist’s name. In my case it was in a folder called “Unknown Artist.” I then moved the track that I wanted for the video to the desktop, went back into Photostory, and browsed for the file when it prompted me to Select Music. I didn’t use other features like narration. The video was saved to the computer desktop.
SchoolTube and TeacherTube. This is where I hosted the videos but first had to register. The registration was easy and fast. As soon as I was verified, I uploaded the video. Both sites give the codes to either embed or link to the video.
School Webpage. I tried to embed the video into our eChalk site, but it didn’t work. I think I am doing it wrong somehow because the preview shows the video perfectly, but when I go to the webpage it is showing as code. So, I just added a link from the SchoolTube video (copy and pasted the link code) on the school’s main page.
Here is the result: Club Fair Video
As of 1:52 pm today the video has been viewed 122 times.
