Another WOW!

If you use TeacherTube (discussed here) to store pupil videos, you can easily link to them on your blog (or website). For WordPress and Edublogs blogs just follow this advice -

Q: How can I embed a video for my Edublogs/WordPress blog?

A: Here are some steps:

1. Copy link provided under “Edublogs/WordPress Embeddable:” within the selected video viewing page.
2. Go to your Edublogs/WordPress “edit” page.
3. Select “Code”.
4. Select “Media”.
5. Paste the url that you copied from TeacherTube and press OK.

It seems to work well.

Download: Posted by kcollazo at TeacherTube.com.

Yet another animation program. Tales Animator uses a scripting language to animate figures to produce good looking cartoons. The scripting language is fairly easy to use but would be too difficult for younger kids. Another free download with lots of extras available on the site.

Many teachers use the Digital Blue Movie Creator for stop motion animation. Although it is easy and fun to use, it has some limitations, particularly the quality of the output.

MonkeyJam lets you create stop motion animation from any web cam, digital video camera or sets of scanned images and outputs good quality avi files. It is freeware so can be used on as many computers as you want for no cost.

If you don’t need the quality, you can import the avi file into Windows Movie Maker and save as a wmv file which is considerably smaller.

Here’s a simple 2 second example in wmvformat. The avi file takes too long to download if you want to use it on the web but the quality is great for showing on a whiteboard or as part of a PowerPoint presentation. The wmv file is acceptable quality with a very small file size.

wmv file 149 Kb

I’m just catching up on this. Thanks to Neil Winton’s post.

SCRATCH is a free program which lets kids create animations by using a simple programming language. It seems to be quite powerful and, apart from the fun the kids would have, it could be used to create quite adventurous programs. It’s not for casual use - you need to spend some time familiarising yourself with the program but the results can be excellent. Take a look a t the examples on the site to see what can be achieved.

The SCRATCH site has the program download, and lots of support materials and examples.