Animoto

Wow ... check this out!

Just go to Animoto and you can upload your own pictures and music (or use some of their music!) to create a super cool short little video! You can send it to your phone, post it to your blog, upload it to YouTube and more.

The only way I found to actually save it as a movie file was to upload it to YouTube, then use MediaConverter to save it as an avi.

Jing It!

One of my favorite cool technology tools I've ever used before is Jing!

You may have heard of SnagIt or Camtasia before - SnagIt is a really easy and professional program that let you take screenshots and easily edit them to go into instructional handouts, etc. Camtasia allows you to easily create video tutorials by recording what is happening on the screen and your narration at the same time. We use both of these programs at school quite a bit. The only real drawback is that they cost some pretty substantial cash! Well, guess what??? They are made by a company named TechSmith that also happens to have a free little application that does practically everything SnagIt and Camtastia do! (Okay, not nearly everything, but still - it's a great program and I often find myself using it rather than the other more powerful applications that we have!)

Jing even lets you create 5 minute long videos and they are very professional looking and super easy to create!

Enough of the commercial ... on with the show!

You can read about Jing at jingproject.com. You will need to download the correction version (yes, my Mac friends ... it's available for you too!) and then walk through the steps to load it. You will need to register to use Jing, but after that, it's easy as pie!

Wordle Fun!

Have you heard of Wordle yet? I first read about it on Tammy's Tech Tips for Teachers (love that site!) but have also seen it mentioned on lots of craft & scrapbooking sites.

It's super easy to use - just go to wordle.net and enter some text (for this example, I simply copied what I had written in the "Meet Me" section of this blog) and hit the GO button. Once your "creation" appears, you can use the font, layout, and color menus at the top to keep changing it until you like it! When you're happy with the design, click the "Save to Gallery" button at the bottom of the screen.

If you're wondering how I posted it here, I then used a screen-capture program (Jing - love it, it will be a separate post!) to save the image as a png and I included it here.

I think this would be super cool to use in school - and you'll be happy to know that it's not even blocked in our district! Woo hoo .... let the Wordle fun begin!

Cool Mosaic Application

I've been having a techno-nerdy Saturday and been blurfing some super-cool techie blogs today! I've found some really fun new Technology tools that are free and easy to use! First, I just love those mosaic pictures that you see on posters, etc. I've found some programs you can purchase to create your own, but I happened upon a FREE program that does a great job! Check out these pictures of my niece and nephew ...
















I used AndreaMosaic and created this:
















What do you think? Click on the picture to see the detail. Here's a little trick ... hold down the ctrl key on your keyboard then use your scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in or out on the page to see even more detail!

Here's another e xample. It's a picture of me when I went and got my hair cut. Boy, I wish I could figure out how to fix it this way again! I may have to go back for another "lesson".

I can't wait to play with this application even more!