Slide shows are definitely are good way to tell a story
using pictures or videos. The web is populated by a vast amount of slide show
services. As an educator, I am a subscriber to many of those services and have
frequently used them whenever I want to display pictures in an animated
fashion followed by music. However, many of the services available on the net require an internet connection and that might make it a bit challenging for creating such artifacts in class if you do not have a connection or the one you have is too slow.
One
of the solutions to this problem is to use iMovie to create movie trailers. Such trailers look like slide shows and are quite easy to create. All you need to do is to open the iMovie app, click on the + sign and choose the trailer option. As I said previously, you can do it without internet connection, save and later export to YouTube, iTunes, Facebook, etc. It is very intuitive and your students can do it themselves. Another thing our teenage students can also do is to create movie trailers for the graded readers they read in class every semester.
Here is a short tutorial
Here is a movie trailer I created with our English Access students. Before creating it, I showed to them the theme we would work on. I divided the picture frames in terms of their experience as students so far asking what they had done, what they liked best. They wrote down their ideas and I gave them my iPad and my iPhone and told them to take shots. This is the final result.
