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Make Your Own Switch Videos |
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About 5 years ago we began making simple switch accessible slideshows for some of our children who were working at an experiential or early control level. These slideshows were made with Microsoft Powerpoint using a number of images which were animated using slide transitions accompanied by a short snippet of sound from a popular record or television programme theme tune. |
| These 'videos' were extremely popular with our children who found the familiar music and images highly motivating. Unfortunately, videos made with Powerpoint were not really accessible to switch and touch-screen users and the large files created problems with portability. |
| In an effort to overcome these problems we began creating the videos using Macromedia Flash. As a presentation tool, Flash has many advantages over Powerpoint, not least the smaller files and greater flexibility afforded through the use of a simple programming language called Actionscript. Flash's cross platform compiling also enabled us to share these videos with others over the Internet. |
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| Flash however is NOT an easy program to learn and if you want to make your videos switch accessible then you do need to learn some Actionscripting. In this article we will share a new way to make switch videos quickly and easily WITHOUT having to learn complex programs like Flash. |
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Getting Started
To make these switch videos you will need two programs, one of which is FREE.
First you need to get a copy of Photo Story 3 which can be downloaded without cost from the link below. Photo Story 3 only works on machines with Microsoft XP.
DOWNLOAD PHOTO STORY 3 from MICROSOFT
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We will use Photo Story three to create a movie file of animated photos set to a short piece of music. This file is useless as a cause and effect program until we add proper switch and touch screen access. To do this we need a copy of SwitchIt! Maker 2 from Inclusive Technology.
DOWNLOAD SWITCHIT MAKER 2 FREE PLAYER VERSION - Click Share Activities
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| To see the results of our tutorial we can use the free player version but if you intend to make your own videos you will need to purchase a copy of this program. The program costs £59.00 and can be purchased online HERE . Ask your ICT coordinator, you may already have this in school. |
| So let's get started. To make the video using Photo Story 3 we are going to need some images and a snippet of sound from the featured artist or television program. One of best ways to get images is to use Google Image Search. Simply log on to www.google.com and click the Images tab. |
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Now type the name of the artist / television program you are looking for. A good tip here is, if the name you are using is more than one word i.e. Craig David then surround both words in quote marks i.e. "Craig David". This forces Google to treat the search as a phrase rather than two individual words. This will significantly speed up your search. Try to choose large images as smaller images may be stretched. |
| by Photo Story and look pixelated in your video. To save an image from any web page, simply right click the image and choose 'Save image as...'. Collect your images together into a folder on your computer. You can download a collection of zipped images for this tutorial HERE |
The only other image we will need is a symbol which will form the switch prompt for our video. You can download an image containing this symbol HERE (remember to right click the link and choose 'Save Target as...'. The image is the PCS symbol for 'touch'.
Save this image into your folder
PCS symbols are copyright Mayer Johnson and are used with Permission. |
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