Checking Out New Programs to Create a Sample Digital Story for a First Grade Classroom

From my wiki page, you can view a sample digital story designed for use in a first grade classroom.  Since I am moving to Georgia, the sample is geared towards a Georgia class with the subject being gray squirrels (which are abundant in Georgia).  This project would be part of a unit on Living Things.  In first grade, we teach living and nonliving characteristics.  Then, we teach about what plants and animals need to live.  The standards go more in-depth, but these are just the basics and we'll focus on the basic characteristics for this beginning project.

Georgia 1st Grade Life Science Standard
S1L1 - Students will investigate the characteristics and basic needs of plants and animals.

The requirements for this particular project would be:

• Tell about living things in general OR tell about one specific living thing (e.g. daffodil, gecko, human, dog)
• Use pictures and sounds to enhance your story.
• The digital story should be about 1 minute long.

I decided to experiment with the programs available on YouTube, because I want to be able to upload and share resources with other educators and students this way. There is a section specifically for educators and the first grade digital stories could be shared here for other students and teachers as well. I also had to make sure the program was suited for first grade (i.e. appropriate, easy to add photos and text, etc).

Some of the challenges I experienced with this sample story were keeping it within 1 minute and sound quality with the voice recording.  I used a free program called MP3MyMP3.  Once I use it a bit more I can figure out if the quality issues were caused by the program, the mic on my laptop, or a combination of the two.  I also am trying to figure out how to remove the "related" videos at the end of the YouTube video. I would not use this program in a classroom with the related videos. Online research shows me how to change the embed code to remove the videos from showing up at the end of my video, but I tried their recommendations and it hasn't worked! I would appreciate it if you had any recommendations for removing the "related" videos or improved audio recording, in addition to any other ideas you might have. 

The purpose of this sample digital story is to excite first graders about creativity, literacy, technology, and science!