• http://sophieproject.org/

Sophie is a multimedia authoring tool released under a creative commons license that holds a great deal of promise for digital storytelling in education.  A free download is required to create and read Sophie projects.  The idea of the book is the central concept.  The creator can simply drag and drop components (text fields, comment fields, etc.) or resources (images, audio, video, etc.) onto a page.  Objects and pages can all be resized.  There is also a timeline feature that lets you start and stop audio or video as well as make any resource appear or disappear from the page.  The comments component also merits special mention.  While the book is downloaded to the readers machine, their comments can be read by anyone else who "opens" the book.  It's a powerful concept combining an easy to use multimedia interface with the communicative properties of a blog.

The interface is very simple and easy to use.  It took me about 10 minutes to learn the basics and another 5 to master the timeline feature.  For a non-technology person who doesn't know terms such as "mouse-up" it may take a little longer, but not much. I could certainly teach a class in a single hour, much less if they already knew IMovie.  The Sophie group is very open to questions as well.

http://sophieproject.org/contact