Baird Tech Bytes

Episode 8: My Aa Book By Julian Rocha is another installment in Julian's alphabet book series.

Episode 6: Similies By Room 61 is a collection of simile PowerPoints created by local middle school special education students. Their teacher gave them the task of creating 20 slides. Each slide had to have two pictures describing the simile. Once the PowerPoints were completed students saved the slide show as jpegs. Students then imported the jpegs into Photo Story 3 and narrated them. This is just one more example of how students can take an assignment and create a podcast with it.

Episode 4: My Qq Book is another example of using Photo Story 3 to create a podcast. Again we went to Google and did key word searches for images that begin with the letter Qq. Julian then narrated each picture. He did add a special touch at the end. Hope you like it.

Episode 3: My Fire Safety Booklet is one more example of taking a classroom booklet and turining it into a podcast using Photo Story 3. This podcast could easily be done by three or four students as a group project. Because Photo Story 3 produces its video format as a .wmv you will need to convert the file to an mp4 format. There are online conversion sites like http://media-convert.com/ which will take a file from your computer and convert it in a matter of minutes. I used a digital camera to capture the books pages. One could also use a document camera or a scanner to get the same results.

Episode 2: My Ee Book by Julian Rocha is another example of taking a 20th Century classroom activity and bringing it into the digital age. Julian is in kindergarten. He has brought home many letter books which have helped him learn the alphabet by sight and sound. For this book we used Google to search for images that started with the letter Ee. We then took those images and imported them into Photo Story 3, typed the name for each picture then had Julian narrate each picture.

Episode 1 Down in the Sea by MadaLynn Rocha is an example of taking a great unit theme and brining it into the digital age. We took her Down in the Sea book and scanned in all of the pages. We then took those pictures and imported them into Photo Story 3. We then typed up MadaLynn's written work exactly as she wrote it. The last step was to have MadaLynn read her information while it was being recorded by Photo Story 3.