End of Year Photo Video

In years past, I spent countless hours putting my End-of-Year photo video onto 20 different DVDs to give my parents.  This year, I've come up with a much better solution that saves me TONS of time, not to mention the money I used to pay for those DVDs as well.

This year, I uploaded my End-of-Year photo video to You Tube.  Then I took the url and made a QR code.  I put the QR code on a card to hand out to my parents at the End-of-Year party.  I also included  the direct You Tube link and directions on how to scan the QR code to view the End-of-Year photo video.  To make QR codes, I use the site QR Stuff.

I shared this with my mom and she was so impressed!  She's a retired teacher and my biggest fan!  She made a good point... that the parents could email the QR code to grandparents (her perspective as a grandmother herself) who can't come to the End-of-Year party and they can still see all the photos of their beloved grandchildren!

I have a Mac, so I used iMovie to make the video, buy my PC teacher friend, Michelle uses Movie Maker.  I added the song from Toy Story, You've Got a Friend in Me from my iTunes.  I looked for other "friend" themed songs, but just when I thought I had found one, I would hear something about drinking a beer or a loving a girlfriend! So I ditched the idea and just repeated the same child-appropriate "friend" song over a couple of times.

Here's  a picture of the card (with QR code) I've made to hand out to my parents after I show the video at our End-of-Year party.  I know they will be happy to know they can download the video to their own computers at home.

These are just a few of the photos in our video.  They are not all together like this in the video, just here so you can see several pages at once.  I like to arrange each slide as if I'm looking at a scrapbook page; most with one to four pics per slide.  I started by making these slides in Power Point.  Then I took a screen shot of each page so I could have image files (.jpeg or .png).  I needed image files to make the movie.

I love to hear what other teachers are doing in their classrooms.  If you have a cool end-of-year activity or idea you'd like to share, use the comment button below.  I will check back often to see what is shared.