Xtranormal

I have been playing around this week with a new web2 service called Xtranormal. I am extremely pleased with this really really really cool tool. Xranormal provides for teachers a very easy way to make high quality animated movies. You don't even have to create an account to use this service. All you do is choose what characters you want in your movie from a list they have available, choose your settings, abient sounds or background music, and type the dialog each character says. There is a click and drag interface for changing camera angles and making the "actors" do gestures.



I see great application of this tool in education. Kids can make stories come alive. This tool puts the focus in movie making on writing which is huge.



With the Video Download Helper Firefox add-on installed you can extract a finished video as an flv file from their website. From there you can upload it to anywhere else you might want to host the file, convert it to a file type that will work in other video editors, or do whatever you like with it. I honestly can't say there has been another tool that has excited me so much since I was first turned on to virtual worlds.