Saturday, March 27, 2010

An old but good programme to promote digital literacy.

Photostory3 is one of my favourite free programmes from MS. It is an old XP programme which lets you collate a set of photos in to a slideshow. It presents the slides with movement and transitions, has a simple narrate button to add commentary and generates its own copyright free music background tracks.   The finished product can be saved as a project for re-editing or exported as a wmv file. The programme is so straightforward you can get preliterate new entrant children creating digital stories by themselves, however, there are some nice customisations that you can find to alter pictures, movement, transitions, just one layer down so that it can easily satisfy the demands of older users as well.
There has been one small hiccough with the compatibility in Windows7. Many people report that they are unable to install it or even run it on an upgrade to Win7. I have personal experience with this, where it worked on one laptop and refused on the other, when both had the same upgrade from vista to win7 professional.  Eventually I was able to get the second one running but I know of many online who don't seem to have succeeded.  MS reports that there is no compatibility issue on their website but win7 certainly thinks otherwise in some circumstances.