Multimedia Authoring
Where once they just did writing, pupils in EYFS and KS1 can use all sorts of tools to express themselves and to publish work. Computers make it possible to publish work, quickly and easily, that combines text with images, sound and video.
For schools that subscribe to Purplemash, 2CreateAStory is very popular with its easy-to-use interface, recognisable tools and not too much text. Children make talking stories in minutes and publish them almost anywhere.
2Create a Story allows children to create their own multimedia digital storybooks. They can combine words, pictures, sounds and animation in a storybook format to publish literacy, science, history, RE and other work. This program allows them to animate their drawings, include pre-recorded or their own noises and sound files, and save their work, and share it by email, with a QR or embed code, on a display board or blog for parents and others to see. These can also be printed out as a fold up storybook.
There are three modes of 2Create a Story: My Simple Story, My Story and My Adventure Story. My Simple Story has a simplified user interface with fewer drawing tools, fewer animations and sounds and no background button. This is to make creating books easier for younger children. My Story includes added features such as backgrounds and sound recording. My Adventure Story, probably more suited to KS2, includes the functionality to create non-sequential links between pages and animate characters
This icon displays the story planner view which shows how the story flows. In a Simple story or My Story this will be sequential. In an Adventure story it may not be. This assists children in planning their story. You can click on any page to go to that page. You can zoom in if you have a mouse with a zoom roller on it or if using a touch screen. When in play mode, the overview will still work to take you straight to a page of a story. This is very useful in Adventure stories when testing whether all the routes through a story work correctly as you do not have to go through the whole story each time. Great Fun!!
If you don’t have PurpleMash, PowerPoint can also be used to combine text, photos, sounds and video files; and hyperlinks can be used to link between items and slides to make non-consecutive stories. This is particularly useful for doing a presentation at, for instance, an annual review. A photograph of the child achieving a target can be inserted with a sound file or text explaining what is happening. But also pupils can get their message across in almost every curriculum area, using sound, video and images as well as text boxes.
An iPad app called “Our Story” is free from the Open University and allows children to combine a photo or short video with text and sound files. This can be printed out but obviously, as with all these solutions, you lose the dynamic aspects of the work, the sound, video and animations. Another excellent tool for annual reviews.
Book Creator is another app that allows the pupils to combine text and drawing, sound and video and gives different shaped books or comic templates. This iPad app costs £4.99 at the time of writing (2019) and you can also buy the app for Chromebook and Windows. After choosing your template you can change the colour of the pages, the text and add videos, sound files, drawing and text to create your own stories. Books can be loaded on the internet and the URL sent to whoever wants or needs to see the finished product. Here’s one I made earlier 🙂
Puppet Edu is an iPad app that allows you to search online libraries for the images you need for your humanities or science work and then add text and sound files as well as a music sound track to your work.
