Reading Large Numbers

I wanted the students to get a chance to work with PowerPoint and we needed practice with commas and reading large numbers.  We combined the two in an project that will end up being a how to movie on reading large numbers.  Yes, a movie.

First I walked them through creating text boxes, changing fonts/sizes, moving boxes, duplicating screens, and moving items behind or forward.  We did the first 23 slides together.  Seems like a lot but several slides only had one thing changed on them as we "walked" the commas to their spot in the big number and we labeled place value spots.  The students were responsible for the last four slides.  I expect the last four slides to duplicate theprevious last four slides we did together except the number should a new one.  The first slide of the last four had the new number on it.  The second slide had the millions place highlighted (by putting a yellow box behind the millions place) and the words reading the number were highlighted and typed below.  The third slide had the thousands place highlighted in orange and the words highlighted in orange.  The fourth slide had the ones, tens and hundreds highlighted in blue with the words for the numbers highlighted in blue below.

After completing the slides we saved our file and then saved it again as jpg files.  To do this click save as and change the file type to jpg.  PowerPoint will ask if you want one slide or all.  We wanted all.  All of the files were converted to jpg files and placed into a folder for later use.

We opened PhotoStory3 and imported our jpg files from the PowerPoint.  We did all of them at once.  To make it easy we changed our view of the jpg files in the folder to a list.  We clicked the first file, pressed shift, clicked the last file and then clicked open.  ( I think that is what the pop-up window said...)

Next we started adding the audio to our movie.  Students were instructed to read the words on the slide but were also told they could had more verbal words if needed to make their how to video clearer.

Our last step will be to preview and make any corrections to the audio.   Then we will create the video.  I'm happy they will be ready for conferences.

I would have liked to completed this with Windows Movie Maker but the students use Netbooks and the Netbooks struggle to run WMM.  Once we have the video done with PhotoStory3 we could convert the file and pull it into WMM on a bigger machine and add a credits screen.  We'll see if we have time for that part.  I only have one machine for WMM in the classroom.