Tips Education Computing

I have just come across this fun photo edition web application.

In Photofunia you can choose from a lot of different fun effects for your photos!

Check these:

I have found Inanimate Alice, an interactive story told in 10 episodes. It looks pretty interesting!

This is taken from their site

'Inanimate Alice' tells the story of Alice, a young girl growing up in the first half of the 21st century, and her imaginary digital friend, Brad.

Over ten episodes, each a self contained story, we see Alice grow from an eight year old living with her parents in a remote region of Northern China to a talented mid-twenties animator and designer with the biggest games company in the world.

Well, it's time for digital storytelling using cartoons.

I have made my first Dvolver movie. It's really easy to use and you can choose from a number of settings, backgrounds, characters and music. Here it is




I am also familiar with Zimmer Twins, which I tried for the first time acouple of years ago. Here´s a movie I made then.
http://www.zimmertwins.ca/node/401843

And here is one made by my daughter Jazmin, who was 10 years old at the time.
http://www.zimmertwins.ca/node/402729
http://www.zimmertwins.ca/node/402857

Zimmer Twins offers more expressive possibilities and I like it better. But both tools have great potential!

This week we were asked to explore Animoto and I could not resist playing around with it yesterday. Here are my comments:

- It looked amazing at first sight.
- You can make as many 30-second shorts for free, but they would only fit 3 or 4 pictures. Too short!
- Full-length videos are $3 each. Haven't tried...

Then I remembered I had seen another tool to do something like that and...I found it!

One True Media is a bit more complex but lets you make a video from your uploaded photos, chose styles, transitions, music and voila! There are premium (paid) features but the free ones work really well! Here's my first experiment with a few photos of my daughter and our three lovely cats.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

This week I'll be exploring and comparing Bubbleshare and Slideshare.

Bubbleshare is very straightforward to use and ideal for photo sharing. I have used it before to build a fable storybook for a fables project we did a couple of years ago. Grade 2 students had read "The Lion and the Mouse" so we did a kind of simple acting out of the fable by creating still frames of the most important parts and took pictures of them. I then uploaded the photos and captioned them with a very simple retelling of the fable.

BubbleShare: Share photos - Find great Clip Art Images.


I also think a nice use is for showcasing students’ productions. I have used powerpoint for that before but Bubbleshare is another option if you want to blog it.

Slideshare, on the hand, I have never used. It looks more suitable for more active presentations including video and audio. I am sure, on more detailed exploration, I will find interesting ways to exploit its potential.

I have also tried this tool. It's called PicLits and it allows you to create word compositions/art on top of a chosen photo. BTW, thanks to Nik Peachey for suggesting it.

I am thinking about vocabulary practice but it can also work for syntaxis.

Have a look at my first attempt. I could not help using the gymnast...


See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

I have been playing around with Bookr. It allows you to make books using pictures from Flickr.

This is my first attempt at a very simple book intended to practice basic vocabulary.



Very simple but indicative of the potential use of this tool.