Free SLR Camera - sort of.

As part of my media class many moons ago we would give the students a go with the schools' one and only SLR camera. I only had basic knowledge of it and passed on something about depth of feild and the rest but like all film cameras - how are you supposed to know what settings you took when the prints come back weeks later (I worked in a remote country school).

With the new digital cameras - even the DSLR's there is a tendancy to leave it up the the camera to work out the best settings for fear of missing the moment.

I've just stumbled across "CameraSim" a virtual SLR that we showe you in an instant what setting will effect what in the photo.

Massive Digital learning Repositories

Good afternoon -
I hope you`are feeling better than me at the moment - Burning the candle at both ends this week - work all week and then exhibit and present at a conference over the weekend, and another conference tomorrow.
Anyway still found some stuff you should know about.

Scootle - the learning federation (Australia) is a licenced product for all schools in Australia - most people have access to it from their department portal if they work for Government schools - for all others there is scootle. You have to look at this - thousands of great videos and interactive digital tools for teachers - Free for you (if you live in Australia and are teaching)


For everyone else in the world - there is FOSSWEB - FOSS (FULL OPTION SCIENCE SYSTEM) Web
is the official site for the inquiry-based FOSS science curriculum.
A place for support, resources, and fun activities.

A new way to storyboard

When I was teaching digital media and we got to digital video or animation I would always make the students storyboard their ideas for planning purposes - plus we only had one camera so it got them started and through natural selction the ones who worked quickly (but up to standard) got hold of the camera first.

I've always thought of storyboards as a low-tech solution... It is hard to imagine how a film will come out just by looking at the storyboards. What if you could put in the scene, characters, script, camera angles and gestures in and see what it would look like...

xtranormal lets you do just that. Currently in beta it allows you to stage manage two characters of your selection.