Xtranormal turns text into movies

Although I've slowed down a bit and relaxed into summer while it's here, I've still be exploring Web 2.0 applications with a bit of an obsessive nature. I came across Xtranormal which claimed to turn my text into movies and thought it sounded interesting.

My first attempt amused me and wasn't half bad, but I'm using this to earn some professional development credit and the content of my first movie wasn't the content I wanted to use. So, I created this movie as an example of a student-made project to answer the question, "How can I be a good citizen during the school day?"



Overall, the learning curve wasn't bad at all. There is a quick help button that recommends the order you do things in if you need it. Some of the animations and character outfits may not be school friendly, but that is really my only area of concern. Otherwise it seems like a fun way to present text and the cadence of speech is enough to cause a bit of amusement. Careful placement of punctuation improves it a bit, but there are still moments!

Animoto, my first

I hadn't really gotten a chance to play with Animoto yet, but have been inspired by the many I've seen over the past year. So, I decided to spend a little (or maybe a lot of) time playing on it today. But I'm pleased with the results and hope to get to use it as an intro of some sort to my staff this year.

Only the beginning...

This summer I transition from teaching first grade for the first four years of my career to teaching technology in the computer lab at school. Of course, that will only be part of my responsibilities in my new position, but it is one of the most important ones. My goal is to reach out to my peers and my students and make a change.

I can think of no better way to christen this new blog than to post the results of four days of work this week. This week I was blessed to have the opportunity to attend a training that explored Web 2.0 and the Cloudware available to us all.

Today was a day of presentations -- the culmination of everyone's hard work. It was an amazing and fascinating day, to say the least. Below are the results of what I learned and explored this week. It is geared towards the younger primary grades because they can do it too! And yes... I plan to use this when training my staff this year!



http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dd979h8n_1ch7r6mcg