A quick and easy way to create photo-stories in PowerPoint is by using the Photo Album feature which allows you to import all your digital photos in one go. To create a photo album, click on the Insert Menu, Picture and New Photo Album. The dialogue box you see above should then appear. Click on the File/Disk or Scanner/Camera to browse for the images you want to include. Select the first image and then hold down the Shift key before selecting the last as this will highlight all your images simultanteously. Click Insert to copy them across.
You can choose whether to have your photos on individual slides or in sets of two, three or four. If you prefer the latter option, click on the dropdown menu next to Picture Layout and make your choice there. When you've finished, click Create.
To add speech bubbles or Callouts to your photo-story, click on Autoshapes on the Drawing toolbar (View/Toolbars/Drawing), hover over Callouts and select one from the menu. This makes the cursor turn into a cross which you drag across the slide to form the Callout. To add text, right click on the edge of the Callout and select Edit Text. Use the Fill Color tool on the Drawing toolbar to change the background colour. If you want to change its line thickness use the Line Styles tool.
Photo-stories are a good way to contextualise language and bring it to life particularly when the stars of the show are your own pupils. Here is an example I uploaded to SlideShare today using images from last year's Brittany trip.
Of course photo stories could work easily as well to illustrate some drama in the classroom or some transactional language such as buying items in a shop or going to the doctors. If you want to publish your creations, clearly you will need to get permission from parents first.
When you're next teaching the topic of daily routine, why not take some shots of your pupils miming the actions such as 'I wake up', 'I brush my teeth' and 'I comb my hair', transfer the photos on to your laptop via a USB lead and import them straight into PowerPoint? I'm sure they'd love it.
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