The Big Question

Today we will have a look at a range of story telling tools that will allow your students to develop and showcase their understandings in a range of powerful ways. We will be exploring the following tools and I have placed them roughly in ease of use order.

Storybird – Tour

Storybird promotes imagination, literacy, and self-confidence. Its a simple writing and publishing tool that is quick, effective and powerful. Look here for the first attempt by a 5 year old. Drag and drop illustrations, text boxes and a quality product created quickly.

A very nice tool. Currently you are able to publish it to storybird, accept comments but not embed elsewhere. Students can collaborate on books.

Tikatok

Tikatok is an online creative community whose mission is to turn kids into published authors. Students can use their own illustrations and publish their book, even order real paperback and hardcover books.

Dvolver – Movie Maker

Create a text based, comic style movie with simple animation. Its very simple, quick and effective. No easy download at this stage or character voices but very easy to use.

Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie

A powerful cartoon/animation creation tool. Choose your characters, background and exercise full control over voices, languages, gestures and framing. Students can create powerful movies, role plays, presentations and debates, quickly and free

Creating and enhancing your personal learning network to empower your profession learning.

Today we will have a look at a range of story telling tools that will allow your students to develop and showcase their understandings in a range of powerful ways.We will be exploring the following tools and I have placed them roughly in ease of use order.

Storybird – Tour

A Tour of Storybird, a great reading and writing tool. Simple, quick and effective. Look here for the first attempt by a 5 year old. Drag and drop illustrations, text boxes and a quality product created quickly.

A very nice tool. Currently you are able to publish it to storybird, accept comments but not embed elsewhere. Students can collaborate.

Dvolver – Movie Maker

Dvolver creates creativity tools. Have you ever wanted to direct your own movie? No problem. Our MovieMaker helps you make a movie in a few simple steps. When your opus is complete send it to a friend. Or, post it to your website or myspace page. No easy download at this stage or character voices but very easy to use.

Whrrl – What’s your story?

Simple iphone friendly story telling, location, images and text, quite good for a procedural text or excursion report. Students can collaborate on projects. Really good with mobile technology.

Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie

Easy Movie/cartoon making – Make 3d movies for free. Includes a range of languages, easy to use interface and a selection of backgrounds. Great for languages

GoAnimate

A very powerful animation tool, very flexible and fully featured. Much steeper learning curve than the other options tagged. Easy to embed or download the result. Top end product, very flexible.

My StoryMaker : Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh

My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects – and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, save it online or print it out in the Library. I really liked the way the story was made and the structure it provided for the students while writing. However the publishing and sharing options are very limited and I would suggest the child capturing the entire creation process with a screen capture tool.

Myths and Legends from E2BN

Welcome to Myths and Legends. This site is for pupils, teachers and all those who enjoy stories and storytelling. Make your own animated myths and legends. Really interesting voices and speech capabilities. I can see a range of uses within HSIE

One of our great challenges as teachers is encouraging students to use a wider range of presentation styles.

Movies can be a great way to bring a range of text types to life, making publishing and sharing student work much more accessable and increasing the access to and impact of their work.

Xtra Normal is a great example of a simple and powerful presentation tool that may be useful in your classroom. Students simply sign in, paste their product (text) into a text box and have it presented by a 3d avatar.  Students can choose from a range of backgrounds, characters, speech styles, expressions and more. Best of all its free.

The movie below is an example of a social justice project where students were working on a short information report on a ways to reduce your eco-footprint.

Note :- A first time user took 10 minutes to take their written content and create their movie.

Vegetarianism – reduce your eco-footprint

With our focus on iMovie 09 today the issue of finding great footage raises it head. Of course if you can go and get that footage yourself that is wonderful however with many of the things that we study thats not possible. Antarctica for example is a visually stunning environment however quite difficult to visit and film.

Fortionately we have some great free options available. We can use these movies as stimulus, create a mashup from them, or modify them to suit our needs.

Welcome to the Archive’s Moving Images library of free movies, films, and videos. This library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts.

ABC Fora brings you the most engaging and interesting speeches and debates from all over the world. It lists movies in the following catogories

Topics

• Arts
• Books and Authors
• Business
• Culture and Society
• Education
• Environment
• Health and Medicine
• History
• Law and Ethics
• Philosophy
• Politics
• Religion
• Science and Technology

Australian Screen – Australia’s audiovisual heritage online

Over 1,300 Australian film and television titles produced over the last 100 years, represented with clips, curators’ notes and other information. Browse titles.

neoK12 Free educational videos and lessons from around the world

There are many ways to download footage to your computer, my current favourite is

Download helper is a extension for firefox or flock. It will search a web page for movies, find each of the different versions, download them and even convert them to the file type that you desire.

Video Monkey is a free video encoding application exclusively for Mac. It is a quick and easy way to convert FLV’s to mp4 so that you can use the media elsewhere.

Sometimes in a classroom or even in a staffroom the easiest way is the best. Posterous has to be one of the easiest ways to publish online, if you can send an email you can create a Posterous blog!!

Email movies, documents, presentations, photos – Basically anything and Posterous will create a blog post out of them and publish it to your blog. A simple and effective way to open your classroom to the world.

The movie below guides you through the process of creating and using Posterous.  (Warning the audio levels are low and Teachertube didnt process the start well, hence the grey at the start). Why not give it a try?

Holy Spirit College are having a Staff Development Day today and are looking at collaboration tools that would be useful for their year 11 students. My session is looking at wikis as a simple and powerful collaboration tool for staff and students.

We will look at some wikis created across the Diocese such as MatheManiac and a PDHPE revision wiki to discover how others are using these wonderful tools and then create our own wikis. This is suitable for any teacher who would like a web presence that is easy to create and edit.

We will use wikispaces today to create our wikis but there are many alternatives available, currently wikispaces seems to offer the best functionality within our schools. Dont forget to request a free education upgrade to remove those advertisements.

A recording of the quick revision of some of the things they were doing within the wiki is below. Click on the image below to view the movie. Unfortionately the sound is very low.

Recently we have been experiencing some issues with uploading to YouTube from school, both via the YouTube uploader and directly from imovie. Fortionately there is a workaround available. The multi-video uploader works, its a little hard to find but clicking on the image below will take you straight there.

You may need to install something but once that is done you can upload multiple files quickly.

Toondoo is a great online comic creator with many great tools, Students can create cartoon characters, cartoons and books, all automatically published. Even better its free.

A new initative from Toondoo is the school domain, a chance to have a space just for your students work. More from Toondoo below.

‘Thanks to concerns (related to inappropriate content) from many educators, we will soon be offering exclusive school domains (such as schoolname.toondoo.com) Many schools have already signed up with us for this service. Here’s how it will work:

• We will provide a separate domain for each school (for example: http://www.schoolname.toondoo.com/).
• ONLY students of that school will be able to create toons at this domain but any one will be able to view them on the internet, embed them in blogs,wikis etc.
• We will let the teachers completely own the editorial rights in this case. That would mean they can monitor the content, block inappropriate toons and also do the editor picks.
• The domain will be free of charge during the beta testing phase of six months, post which there would be nominal annual charges for it.’

If you are interested, please contact Meera Sapra:meerasapra@toondoo.com.