My Blog is 100 posts old today.

Just sitting with a couple of coleagues adding the finishing touches to some materials for the year six leavers service.

We began the session scanning images of the students at different ages, that showed how they had changed as they progressed through school. The original intention had been to use PowerPoint and create a photo slideshow, but as the import process became laborious and I was asked about adding music, I have suggested they might consider using PhotoStory for their project instead.

As an environment PhotoStory is very easy to use. I have used it on several occasions this year to support multimodal text development. With Year Four Students to make short animated presentations (The Seasons ) , that morphed student created, and Monet like, digital landscapes through cycles of change. With year 6 students we created similar presentations using digital self portraits, and cascade saving to explore digital self portraits (Ready Steady Shoot ).

Getting back to my colleagues, I think they have been surprised at how simple and versatile the tool is. And how quickly, once they had their images everything has come together. They have also beguin to make suggestions about how they might use this to support work in the classroom, following up visits, logging learning, or as a means of developing narratives using images to support. I like the way it can potentially be adapted to support cyclical approaches to digital text development. Eg Having watched and explored trailers or perhaps TV ads, images or scenes could be captured or created, and imported to the environment. Based on table top work developed around the language forms and structures used, students could return to use this in the development of their own models and texts in these media based genre.

Returning home this evening, it was great to recieve Joe's comment, and to read his take on my post over the weekend about What students get from Podcasting. I have learned a great deal over the last month or so from my visits to his blog about a process and medium, which is still very new to me. Thanks, look forward to continuing to compare notes.