Second Life Teacher Training Videos

A few months ago I did some work on a series of teacher training videos for teachers who want to use Second Life, and I'm glad to say these have now been published on Russell Stannard's Teacher Training Videos website.The series has more than 30 short clips. The clips start from the very basics of registering and setting up your avatar, through, setting up and adjusting voice, taking snapshots, making movies to basic building.Russell has made an...

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Creating multimedia stories

I know that it's easy to be cynical about Microsoft, but every now and then they do produce great things for free! Photo Story 3 is one of those great things, and yes it is free!Photo Story 3 a piece of free software that you can download to your PC and use to create multimedia photo stories complete with images, transitions, effects, text, background music and your own voice narration.Here's a 2 minute Flash movie showing you how to use it and some of the features.Here is a movie I created with it to show off my Second Life office. There are two...

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Picture phrases

Phrasr is an interesting new website that allows users to input sentences, phrases or even entire paragraphs and then turn them into illustrated slide shows using Flickr images. All you have to do is type in your phrase and click, you then get an image for each word. If you don't like the image you get then you can change them and when you are ready you just give your work a name and title a click to publish. What you then get is like a slide show...

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Prompting reading speeds

This is a really handy little tool which is doing the rounds at the moment. It's called CuePrompter and it's an online Teleprompter.For those not in the know, a Teleprompter is a tool used by news readers, TV presenters etc to help them remember their lines. They read it from above the camera.This one is very simple to use and you simply cut and paste your text into the field, choose screen size, text size and colours and click a button and you...

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Animating vocabulary

I've just been looking at a useful websites called Gifup that enables users to quickly and easily create animated gifs / image sequences like the one below. This seems to me a like a really useful way of revising and teaching vocabulary.What are the sports?This is a gif that I created to revise some sport vocabulary. It took about 3 mins to make using images from Flickr.Here's a tutorial movie showing how I made it. (1.2Mb swf)It was very simple...

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Multimedia wordsearch

This is a really nice tool that I have just discovered. It's called PhotoSoup and it generates wordsearch activities based on any topic in just seconds.It's very simple and works on images from flickr. You simply type in your topic and the site automatically generates a word grid and image clues. You then have 90 seconds to find all the words. You can get hints and even get it to show you the answers.Watch a short video to see how it's done. (499k...

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