Create your own photo story

Perhaps an idea if you are looking for another approach to a group task or a cross-border project. Why do not you let the students put together a photo story?

A photo story is a bit like a drawing: you place some pictures on a page and combine that with a little text.

One of the advantages of a photo story is that you do not need much material and knowledge: a digital camera and a program like Word are sufficient.

Step 1 : Divide the class into groups. At least you should count on four to five students per group. Do not make the groups too big.

Step 2 : Determine the theme of the photo story. In principle, you can leave an existing story, a novel from a novel, a scene from a play ... But as well as following a project, students can develop their own story. At our school, the students of 5GWW work out an environmental week. They could make a photo story about energy saving at school or around litter litter in the area, ... Give the students at least enough time to inform themselves about the topic they have chosen.

Let us continue from this point of view, so the students work out their own story.

Step 3 : Determine who you are going to work out the photo story for. Traditionally, our 5GWW students present their project work to the classes of the second grade ASO.

Step 4 : Explain the story in text. Make sure the beginning (exposition: what is the problem) and the end (the solution to the problem) are clearly formulated. Analyze the problem statement. What aspects are you going to treat? How can you portray those aspects? Where do you find examples?

Step 5 : The story is staged. What characters do we provide? What spaces do we need? What attributes? How are the characters dressed at what time? What practical problems should we solve?

Let the students discuss how they see the character, what past does the character convey, what ideals does it have? Not all of this information has to be processed in the dialogs, but it helps to make the character more vivid and realistic, so that the overall work will also deliver better quality. If your story extends over a period of time, it's normal for the characters to wear different clothes at different scenes.

As a result, the story is transformed into a script. The action is divided into a number of scenes, and a number of recordings are provided per scene. In practice, you will probably need photos between the thirty and sixty-six. Let the students make some extra shots. It will be difficult to re-record at a later time with the same costuming.

Step 6 : Take photos. At the moment, students have made clear choices. There are the characters, there is a photographer, there is a director, although the photographer may occasionally also be a character and may also come to the forefront of the director. Snapshots generally deliver a more lively result, but if you do not have the right material (camera, extra exposure), the pictures may be blurred. Allow the students to check every recording immediately and, if necessary, make a new recording. Avoid working with flash, unless as a fill-in flash to soften the shadows in a close-up.

Step 7 : Unsubscribe the dialogs (even if you can already process the dialogs in step five, when you are editing the script). You now have a full picture of what is visually available. As a result, you can also start thinking about the title page of the photo story.

Step 8 : Work out the photo story. You could use the Comic Life program, but you can also work without incurring additional costs using software that you already own: Microsoft Word (or Microsoft PowerPoint ) and software that you can download for free ( Irfanview ).

Irfanview is software that lets you edit photos and one of the great features is that it supports batch processing. If you save all the pictures you want to use in the story in a folder, you can take all those pictures right-handed with a single action.

Suppose we want to provide rows on an A4 page, with two frames in each row. A simple calculus teaches us that we can make the pictures 7 cm wide. This gives a height of 4.7 cm, so we can provide four or five rows of pictures on a page. For five rows, you may need to adjust the margins up and down.

If you work in landscape, you can provide three pictures of 8 cm (height 5,4 cm), so space for three rows.

Start Word and enter a table with the required number of columns and rows. Select the entire table and right-click. Choose Table Properties and set the row height for all rows to a fixed number of centimeters.

Add the first customized photo, insert Word text boxes, etc., enter the required text, and repeat until you've transferred all the photos. Regularly update your work.

Step 9 : Try to get feedback from a test group (students from another class, teachers from other subjects) and try to process feedback in the presentation.

Step 10 : Publish your work (why do not you ask the director if you can put it on the school website?).

For step 8, the actual work out can you be assisted by a colleague ict and why do you not involve the colleague physics or aesthetics in the project for aspect photography?

Obviously, this project will take some time, but if you plan a good schedule, you can spread it over a longer period of time and allow the students to continue working on the project if you happen to have a few minutes left at the end of the lesson.