Although I don’t spend a great deal of time on Twitter, I’ve been tweeting for about a year now.  One of many things I appreciate about Twitter is the sharing that happens.  A couple of weeks ago, Alex Britez (@abritez) used Twitter to share an interesting potential learning resource.  I immediately took it for a test drive, and I think there are many learners who could use it effectively to show what they know as well as for creative expression.  Teachers may want to try using it to engage their learners.

xtranormal bills itself as a ‘Text-to-Movie’ application.  Their tag line says, “If you can type, you can make movies.”  You also need to be able to choose from a range of available characters, facial expressions,  animations, settings, sound effects, etc.  The possibilities are unlimited.

There is a helpful set of Quick Tips to guide the novice movie maker through the process.  The quality of the text-to-speech is remarkably good, as is the range of available creative options.  Movies can be shared and easily embedded elsewhere on the net.  You even have the option of re-mixing movies that have been made by other film makers.

I hope there will always be a free version of this application.  There are indications that once the product is out of beta, there will be a paid premium service available.  I did a random check of movies on the site for inappropriate content, and apart from some foul language on one movie, nothing jumped out at me as totally inappropriate.  Still, I can’t vouch for the school-suitability of all content on the site.

I’ve held off on posting about Xtranormal because I was unable to embed a sample video here on Edublogs.  I’ve exchanged email with Xtranormal‘s developers, but we haven’t yet worked out what the problem is.  There seems to be no problem using the embed code elsewhere, so I’m giving up here for now.

So Click Here to see a 30-second movie that took me about 30 minutes to create.  That included working through the Quick Tips to figure out how it all worked.