Tools to Create Your End-Of-Year Presentations

It is the end of the year and many of you have stories and photos to share with your students, parents, and the community.   I thought I would create this blog post to highlight some of the ways you can create those slideshows and share them.  

Before sharing your slideshow on your website or with the public, please check with your office to make sure all student have permission for their photo to be shown.   

~ Photostory (Windows Only)

Photostory3 is probably the easiest way to create a slideshow, it is free but is only available on Windows machines.  It handles only photos so there is no way to in-cooperate videos you might have created.    One trick that I use often for title slides is to upload a solid color photo and add the text on top of that slide.   The ending product of Photostory is a video file that can be uploaded to youtube and shared publicly.

~ Windows Movie Maker (built into Windows)

Windows movie maker will give you similar tools to Photostory, but also allow you to intermix photos and videos.

~ Youtube slideshow creator (webbased)

The YouTube Slideshow creator is built into youtube.   You can access it by logging into youtube with your @school.org account => Clicking Upload => Then clicking slide show.   You can add non-copyrighted music from the application and some nice transitions.   The ending product is already on youtube so all you need to do is share the link.

~ Slidespeech (webbased)

Created largely by +John Graves the way Slidespeech works is that you create a PowerPoint or Google Presentation and in the show notes section write a script.  Slidespeech uses text-to-speech technology to read your script for you.  The script can be edited on SlideSpeech and you also have the option to record your own voice.

Slidespeech is also available for iOS and Android.  There is also a Chrome extension which allows you to use Google Presentations natively.

Here is a Slidespeech video I created on Slidespeech: http://slidespeech.com/s/jh5y4unfen/

~ Prezi (webbased)

This site is like combining a concept map and presentation tool into one.   With this you will be able to group your photos and videos (uploaded to youtube) into different events or sections.

If you have other slideshow software methods that you like please share them as comments below.