Electric Chalk

Another one for the resource directory…

Are you keen to get away from endless PowerPoints and uninspiring slideshows?

Animoto has been making waves for some time now. This is a great tool for taking a selection of still images and turning them into a professional-looking multi-media slideshow. Once you have an account it’s fairly straightforward to upload your gifs or jpegs, add text and then pick music (either your own or from their library)

Animoto then stitches them together with cool animations and you can embed, email or download as an mp4. For a fee you can get the results at DVD quality.

Here’s an example I put together. The pictures in themselves are pretty dull, they’re from a project we did on the anti-social behaviour and the built environment, but it gives you idea what can be done. It tok me about 10 minutes to make.

 
They have got a dedicated mini-site for education users which gives free access to just about everything for a limited period (6 months I think) so a class can access it. Check out the Learn More link for further details.

Great for creating visual interest getters, discussion starters for teachers. For students, a great way of  presenting work in subjects right across the curriculum.

Loads of potential!

Check out Xtranormal.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m actually working when I come across things like this! Once again thanks to The Ed Techie for drawing it to our attention.

Basically, it’s a 3d animation tool for dummies. You type in your script select character costumes, pick camera angles, sounds, music etc.

The results can be crude but have a certain charm to them. Here are a few examples…

Introduction to a teaching topic on digital media

 

Something more fun…
 

Excellent tool for teaching about storyboarding and pre-production or maybe just general cross-curricular idea presentation.

Word of warning, it’s at beta stage at the mo so using it as a class activity may not be reliable. Also, when it comes out of beta testing you may find that you have to pay to put stuff up on it.

Here’s a wee Christmas present to all you struggling teachers.

Aaron, Electric Chalk’s web-wizard, has created a new resources directory site accessed form the tabs at the top of the page. Or here…

Blogging what we come across is fine but finding stuff later can be a bit of a mare so here we’ll be categorising everything for quick access along with links back to the post evaluating it.

Feel free to nominate links to appear in the directory. We’ll be moderating it to keep it clear of rubbish, mind.

Merry Christmas!

image: Christmas Cliche by Cayusa

Another good piece from Teachers’ TV. Part of their excellent ICT SOS series.

I’ve talked about using VLE’s to list suggested links for students rather than free-Googling. Here they suggest using MS Publisher to create an HTML page and including writing frames in the document to help them structure their responses - a great idea as just expecting the students to write what they find isn’t effective.

Check out the resources page for instructions and lists of software.

The 2nd part is about podcasting to help with revision and is also worth your time.

I’m going to have a play with the Podomatic podcasting software featured and post an evaluation for you before Christmas.

(Note: The spelling on the link in the resources document is wrong - my link should work fine)

A wee while ago the Guardian newspaper did one of their excellent little guides to making video. I had a paper copy but just came across it online here.

If you are about to venture into the murky world of digital video you could do a lot worse than start here. There are a bunch of very accessible articles on a wide range of issues.

Particularly good are:

• How to make a bloody awful video
• Making sound effects
• Filming a horror movie (great for those ubiquitous media projects that always seem to turn into horror trailers!)

Hope you find it useful…