Photostory 3 for Windows is a free download. It allows you to make slide shows from images, however it does alot more than that. You can add your own music, create music within the program, you can pan and zoom within each image, add narration, transitions and save as a video file. This could then be played in a media player or imported into a presentation, whiteboard resource or even uploaded to Youtube!
The video above is basically a slide show of images, with added zoom and pan and an imported mp3. Took about 10 minutes to do as a quick demo.
A great site for download links and video tutorials can be found
here at http://www.jakesonline.org/photostory.htmAudacity is an audio editor and free download. If you are a Radiowaves school or an Action Zone school you may well have had training on recording, editing, mixing and exporting audio. It can be found at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ .
Even if you don't have an mp3 recorder you can use a microphone plugged into your computer. Unlike Photostory it's also available for a Mac.
A fantastic resource for free instrumental music is available from Audio Networks at http://audio.lgfl.org.uk . You can only connect to it through an educational establishment that has subscribed to the license. Which means you're fine from a Rotherham or Doncaster school!
Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.
Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.
Scratch is available free of charge, go to http://scratch.mit.edu.
Currently available for Mac OSX and Windows
Terragen is a free landscape generator where you can carve out worlds, add skies, change water levels, atmospheres, play around with camera angles, sun elevation (for shadow work). You can cover the ground in grass, rock, snow and much more. You can do a fly through animation or save as a picture file. It can then be opened in a picture editor and buildings etc added.
There's a great gallery of other users images and the download at
http://www.planetside.co.uk