From Word and a photo, to a Gemini Storybook, to PowerPoint and finally to an .mp4 video

When our granddaughter's 15th birthday was approaching my daughter asked me to look back at when I was 15 and find a photo and write about my life at that age. I found a photo of me with longish hair, as it was 1962/1963, and started writing about my life as a 15-year-old.

I then uploaded to Gemini what I had written and the photo and later a picture of the boater that we had to wear at Sevenoaks School and asked for a Storybook. I had to correct a couple of things as my name was never Julian and the boater wasn't pictured accurately.

I shared everything with my daugher, who shared it with our granddaugher.

A couple of weeks later I read again Joe Dale's suggestion about how you could download and edit a Gemini Storybook and decided that I wanted to try it for myself.

I'd read somewhere else that you could always print a Storybook and with the option to print to pdf, I chose that and got a pdf. The next step that Joe suggested was to go to PDFGear's Convert PDF to PowerPoint Online Free page and convert my file to a Powerpoint file. For some reason one of the pictures failed to convert, but as the .ppt file was editable I was able to 'snip' the missing photo from the Storybook and add it to the page where it should have been.

The next step was to edit the text to make it more suitable for a B1 learner of English, and here it helped that I have a subscription to Microsoft 365 Family, so I could ask M365 Copilot to make a new version of all the texts that would be suitable for a B1 student. I then copied and pasted each text into the editable text boxes on the right of each slide.

I asked Copilot if it could provide me with an audio file of the text read aloud by a male British voice, which Copilot said it coudn't do, but it suggested I record myself reading it. I decided to do this using PowerPoint and recorded myself reading each slide as it was displayed. At the end it offered me the option to Export the file as an .mp4 file, which I later uploaded to YouTube.

I was delighted to be able to try out Joe Dale's idea for myself and thought it offered a wonderful way to make compelling comprehensible input for learners of any language