Silent Photo Story: Digital Storytelling with a Twist

Last week my students created a Silent Photo Story project that was inspired by this pin on Pinterest.  (The two students that made the project, below left, gave me permission to post their project.  You can find it at the end of the post and HERE.)

Before assigning the project to my students, I did a trial run by texting photos of a story, with the sentences written on an app on my ipad, to my daughter that was at her college tennis match.  (See one of the photos from the story below on the right.)  I searched for a way to post the photos on an app that would automatically advance each page of the story instead of having the photos listed vertically as on the Pinterest example.  The easiest user-friendly method I found for students to use is the Educreations app.

The purpose of the project was for my students to write in the past tense, include sentences that describe how someone felt about the actions of another person (the imperfect subjunctive), and for the majority of the creative aspect of the project to be completed outside of class time.

The Silent Photo Story project:

A. Requirements
   - Write a story in the past with a minimum of 10 sentences.
   - A minimum of 2 of the sentences must describe how someone felt about
     the actions of another person or about a situation.
   - Write each sentence on a mini-whiteboard. (I gave each student 2 
     markers, an eraser, and a mini-whiteboard to take home.)
   - Take a photo of you holding the marker board with the sentence. Your
     actions should match the sentence on the board.
   - E-mail the photos to your school g-mail account.

B.  Students had 4 days to complete the assignment.  I offered to proofread their sentences before they took the photos, but none of the students took me up on this offer.  (Next time, I will require the students to have a mini-conference with me before they complete the project.)

C.  The day it was due, I signed out the department i-pads.  The students accessed their photos through their g-mail, copied the photos to the i-pad, and opened the Educreations app.

D.  On the Educreations app, they uploaded one photo per page/slide.  Then they made a silent recording, pausing 3-4 seconds on each page.  (If you save the project before making the silent recording of each page, the app will only save the initial page of the project.)

E.  After the recording, they saved the lesson and followed my detailed instructions on how to post their projects directly on our class Edmodo page.  Those directions can be downloaded HERE.

F.  The following day in class, we sat in a circle (conversation style which means without desks) and read the stories. 





Note:  This project can also be done completely in class if you do not want to send the supplies home with the students.  One of my students completed his project at home, but it was in one location instead of several locations as in the example above.  His expressions perfectly matched the action in his story.  If I he gives me his approval to post it, I'll add it later.