Its quickly coming to that time of year again when teachers think about making an end-of-year video slideshow for their classes. Be it 6th class graduating to secondary school or Leaving Certs getting ready to say goodbye to 2nd level education, teachers will often include a video slideshow as part of their graduation ceremony. Summarizing and celebrating the school year in a short audio/slideshow video is a lovely touch that is usually greatly appreciated by parents and pupils alike. There are many tools and applications at our disposal but the following are amongst the most user friendly and useable that I have come across in recent times.
Adobe Express Video
Adobe Creative Cloud Express was previously known as Adobe Spark. I’ve been using it since its launch seven or eight years ago. Adobe Creative Cloud Express makes it easy for teachers and students to create simple audio slideshow videos. It includes a library of background music that you can insert into your videos. Finally, Adobe Creative Cloud Express is a collaborative tool so you can invite a colleague to work on developing an end-of-year slideshow video with you. Watch this video to learn how to make a video with Adobe Creative Cloud Express.
Canva
Canva offers two ways to create audio slideshow videos. The first way is to simply put together a series of slides and then select a soundtrack to play in the background. That process is demonstrated here. The other method is to use Canva’s full video editor to add narration and custom timings to an audio slideshow video. That process is demonstrated in this video.
Microsoft Photos
Microsoft Photos includes a video creation tool for making short audio slideshow-style videos. You’ll find this by just opening the native photos app in Windows 10/11. Within the editor there are tools for adding animated effects to still images, insert your existing video clips into a video project, and tools for adding audio to your video. There’s also a great option to search for Creative Commons licensed images and insert them directly into your video project. The best part of that feature is that attribution information is automatically added onto the images you choose through the built-in search tool. The following video provides a demonstration of how to create a video in Microsoft Photos in Windows 10.
Google Photos
In Google Photos there is a section called “utilities.” It is in the utilities section that you’ll find the video creation tool. To use it all you need to do is select up to 50 pictures and or videos that you have stored in your Google Photos account. Google Photos will then automatically select display length for each image or video and automatically add background music to your video. If you don’t like what was automatically selected for your video, you can manually adjust display length and choose different background music. Watch this short video to learn how to make an audio slideshow video with Google Photos.
The video creation tool in Google Photos does limit you to 50 images per video. If you need to make a longer video, you could make two or three videos in Google Photos then download them and combine them in iMovie or WeVideo.