Storytelling, Slide Sharing and WebSlides

At the school library tech camp session last weekend, some of us got talking about using Web 2.0 tools for digital storytelling. I decided to play with a few tools and create a new page about storytelling on my wiki: http://lib20.pbwiki.com/resources-storytelling

The tools all take your photos or images and let you add audio and/or text narration.

• VoiceThread is a wonderful tool that I’ve mentioned here before that lets you upload your images, add text notes and audio. Other users can also chime in and leave audio and text notes.
• Animoto was new to me (mentioned to me by Diane Cordell on TeacherLibrarianNing) Animoto lets you create short videos from your individual images and synchs them to music that you select or upload. The transistions and effects are all synched to the mood of the music and create the feeling of a video. Great fun.
• SlideShare is a great place to upload and share your powerpoint presentations. And it has a terrific new feature that lets you add your audio narration to the slides.

For a ton of tools see Alan Levine’s terrific collection of tools at 50 Web 2.0 Ways To Tell a Story

And now for the really cool find:

• WebSlides – I found this through Alan Levine’s list of tools. It takes your list of URL’s and creates a live slide show of the sites in the list. And even handier, add an RSS feed of a list of links and you have a live slide show in moments. I added a feed from del.icio.us of sites that I’d been bookmarking for an upcoming class. Wow, a live slide show of all those sites, in just seconds!
• Link to my test of WebSlides – because the ‘slides’ are actually views of the live web sites, the videos in the first ‘slides’ will play. Much more fun than a static slide show, though not much help if you don’t have internet access or a slow connection. Still I think I’ll be using this one a lot!