Amazing website and resource

One of those stumbleupon gems...

Water Life - Produced by the national film board of Canada it is the story of the great lakes. But it is the creative design of the website and atmosphere of the site that is absolutely amazing. Sometimes I just have the music going in the background. Brilliant user interface that is both original and fun to explore without being so esoteric that you cant get back to the beginning.

If you want to see how a multimedia site should be done - this is a great example of some super Flash animations and interactions.

Learning areas - Science, SoSE, Maths, and as a great example of digital media.

Making your own iwb content

Seems I've taken a holiday from my blog...

Unfortunately I wasn't on holiday... I've been working harder than ever before at my current job as well as a few home projects which I'll show later when I get them a bit further along.

I had an author contact me recently - she was looking for a way to create here own interactive whiteboard resource to go with some picture books that she has written.

Now back in the day I used to use Authorware, Director and Flash to generate interactive multimedia, but that is now over 10 years ago and I have not kept up my skills.

So I went on the hunt for easy to use cheap/free tools to create stand alone multimedia packages that included basic computer based training stuff like quiz es, cloze, matching and drag and drop type activities.

So here is what I found

CourseLab - This is the system we are going to use. Nice interface, no coding if you don't want to and easy to use. Best of all it's free.Image via Wikipedia

LAMS - more server based but again easy to use and set up - Free too

Xerte - More coding than what I would like - but would be really good once you get your head around.

eXe - Easy to use but not enough "fun" stuff for our purposes (storybook), but for secondary and tertiary courses this is very quick and easy. Again free.

Free Video Analysis Tools

Image via Wikipedia

I was looking through a PD calendar and noticed a session for Dartfish which is great software but a bit expensive for schools. so I decided to see if there was any free/open source tools around.

Video analysis tools are used to play with video to help visualise things that happen within a video recording. You can use video analysis for several learning areas. The main one is sport and PE where a teacher/coach can analyse technique, body flow and pick up issues that might be effecting performance. It can also be used to analyse game/team play.

On a more scientific level, video analysis can be used for physics experiments - particularly to track objects and measure time, distance and therefore acceleration / deceleration.

Finally video analysis is great for the arts, for both dance and drama. You could also give it to a student in visual or media arts class to see what creative uses they could find.

I came across these and I hope someone finds them useful,



http://www.kinovea.org/en/ (MAC and PC)

http://www.cabrillo.edu/~dbrown/tracker/ - more for physics and science. (Mac and PC)

http://video4coach.com/ - both skill capture and skill Spector are free (PC only)


and if you need It - a video transcoder – for changing formats

http://handbrake.fr/

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