I’m always anxious to find great new Web 2.0 tools that enable my students to display their learning in new and different ways that engage them in the learning process more than traditional research papers. My latest fun tool is Xtranormal.
Xtranormal is nothing like normal. It’s a supercool way to create quick and easy animations. Sure the voices are computer-generated, but you can make your characters say anything you want superfast, supereasy! Just set up a free account at Xtranormal, select a cast, decide how many characters your movie will need–one or two–and get started writing your movie.
There are nine basic scenes, and you can change camera angles within each character’s script. All you do to start a new character’s conversation is click on the plus sign.
You can drag all sorts of cool stuff into each character’s script. Try animations, looks, expressions, points, pauses, and sound effects. There are even different camera angles to keep your animation from being so boring. No one wants to keep looking at the same scene throughout the entire movie! Whenever you drag something into the script, you can try it out on your character inside the script bubble to see what it looks like.
Once you’re finished, you just click on the action button and your animation starts rendering and all that cool movie talk. Give it a few seconds, and then your movie will be ready to preview. Not satisfied? No problem! Editing is a breeze. Then you just save again.
When you’re finally thrilled with your results, you can share your video with the world! But, please, WordPress, get into the twenty-first century so we can embed Flash videos in our blogs!
Ruth Fleet, Ed. S., NBCT
Library Media Specialist
Dean Rusk Middle School
If you haven’t had a chance to try Pageflakes (or Netvibes) as an information portal to stream information on a topic for your teachers and students, then take a look at my latest Pageflakes pagecast to see the power of social media! I created a 
