Xtranormal

("Robots Go Gaga" by Linda Cahill)

I was recently taking a look at what some of my fellow educators had produced for their first technology assignment and came across an inspiring blog by Mrs Karen Willis which can be found here. In Karen's blog she wrote about the beauty of collaborating to produce her first animated movie using Xtranormal and she did a fantastic job. Xtranormal for those who don't know is a movie creation tool that uses text to speech technology. Users can create a video by choosing characters, a background, and then typing the dialogue to be read aloud by the computer program. Additional animations and sound effects can be easily dragged and dropped into the text boxes to add to the dialogue. This site allows for movies to be shared to popular social media sites, provides embed codes linking directly to your own movie, and allows for easy publication to YouTube. As a tool within the classroom students could easily use Xtranormal to create narrative stories, recreate scenes from a novel being read in class, or they could use it for reflective learning to share what they have learned. A fantastic site which list some of the uses of Xtranormal according to specific content area's can be found here, and another site which provides an overview of how Xtranormal can be incorporated within the classroom can be here. Wanting to try out Xtranormal, I created a short movie with my children based on a popular pop song for fun. I hope you enjoy it!