Electric Chalk

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.

I was shown this ages ago then promptly lost track of it but Indiana Jones-style, I’ve dug it up from the Mediasnackers blog archive.

It’s a nice, easy way of creating timelines from a list of events (either type them in or import a CSV file) and then link the events to explanatory text and/or bits of media.

The results can then be viewed on the x-timeline site or embedded in another site like I’ve done here. SPOILER ALERT - if you don’t want to know what happens to Dumbledore don’t look at it.

I can see great applications in history but also english if your analysing a novel or play or even an author’s output. What about the timeline of a natural disaster?

Enjoy.

Just came across this on Martin Weller’s excellent Ed Techie blog.

You cut and paste a piece of text or put in the URL for a website that has a RSS or Atom feed and it generates a cloud of the most used words (excluding the really common ones like prepositions and articles). It’s a bit like the tag cloud you get on blogs but for a whole body of text.

It would be an excellent reflective tool for essay writing or analysing a body of poetry, maybe also as a starting point for creative writing.

Just as an example, here’s what you get if you put the Electric Chalk URL into Wordle (click thumbnail to see full size)…

Interestingly, the word “education” doesn’t figure as much as “PDA’s”. Think I’d better stop ranting about them!

Some issues - The Safari browser I’m using doesn’t like the Java application so try IE or Firefox. Also, when embedding the HTML it needs to be all on one line, not as published on the Wordle site which has line breaks.