flynn089

Flipz TV is a really useful piece of free software for creating entertaining audio-visual materials. The software enables you to record your own audio monologues and lip-sync them with a choice of animated talking heads. It then turns them into small Flash files which can be run in a web browser. These can be put on the Internet, run form your computer desktop, or the Flash files can even be delivered to mobile phones. Here’s an example that I created using a Sonnet (130) by William Shakespeare. (You’ll need to have the sound o your computer turned up) Click here to see an example Use the small controls on the right to stop and replay the audio. What I like about this software, apart from the novelty value, is Flipz creates quite small files. You could easily email the file to students with some instructions so they could listen at home or in a self access lab. Or put them on their phone or mobile device. You could make some really useful homework tasks for them. The students could eve...

D- film is a really useful website that has been around for a few years now. The site makes it very easy to create short animated movies with colourful characters and cartoon style dialogue in bubbles. (Be careful though, some of the characters may be unsuitable for younger learners less mature students.) The site is really easy to use and you just click your way through various screens selecting backgrounds, characters, scenarios, soundtrack and credits. You also type in your own short dialogues. Then when you are ready a single click turns the whole thing into a Flash movie. You can make short single screen animated movies or longer ones by adding more scenes. You can then email the link to your movie either to yourself or to your students etc. How do I create movies? If you watch this tutorial you can see just how easy it is to make a film. Tutorial movie (458k flash) Here’s an example of a film that took about 2 minutes to produce. Example movie This link takes you straight to t...

I’ ve just seen that the BBC has released a lot of its own internal staff training courses and made them available free online at: http://www.bbctraining.com/onlineCourses.asp What's on the site? I’ ve had a look through the courses and they really are good, especially if you want to work with audio for podcasts or video for projects. Some of them are very short, so even if you only have 10 – 15 mins to spare you can still get some development from them. I looked at one on interviewing for radio : This one has some really useful audio files of interviews which you could actually use with your students for listening activities. There is also a collection of short vox pops interviews which have a huge range of different UK accents. I also looked at one on the basic principles of shooting good video footage . It had lots of short video clips with audio voice over and they all had text transcriptions available. The clips were all quite short, so they wouldn ’t take too long to do...