Text to speech movies with Xtranormal

Nik Peachey has put together an excellent how to guide for new text to speech tool Xtranormal which can create animated videos from simple dialogues and upload them on YouTube. Check out his demo here to get a flavour.

Bluechoco4life has already tried out the tool for teaching basic phrases in French and the results are interesting. Have a look at French for Beginners 1 and French for Beginners 2 to see what I mean. If you like what you see, you could subscribe to new episodes by pasting this feed into Google Reader. Mmm ...

Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of inappropriate content on the site and therefore I would not recommend pupils login and make their own role-plays. Hopefully an education version will be made available in the future as the learning potential is definitely there. However, in the meantime, it could be used as a model for role-plays or presenting new language as Nik suggests in his teaching tips.

If the site is blocked in your school, you could make a clip at home, download it with Real Player 11 and then bring it in on a USB stick or play it directly from your laptop (if you are lucky enough to have one).

Thanks Nik for the heads up.

Comments

[Nik Peachey]

Hi Joe

Thanks for the link and I'm glad to see the video is getting around. On the issue of inappropriate content, I think that's always going to be a problem with any Web 2.0 site that allows for user generated content or interaction. I think what we need to do is to hassle the creators while they are still in beta to ensure that there are ground rules for conduct and a means of reporting and banning people who use the sites in an inappropriate way. I think the creators of the sites are keen to get a wider audience and educational use can certainly bring that, so if we let them know what we want then we're more likely to get the service we want. You can email and hassle Xtranormal here: support(at)xtranormal.com They are asking for feedback. So let's tell them what we want. Then we can set our students lose on gret tools like this knowing that they are protected.

Best

Nik

[Joe Dale]

Hi Nik,

Thanks for your comment and for bringing Xtranormal to my attention.

I agree totally with your sentiments and think we should ask makers of Web 2.0 tools like this to think of the potential of opening them up to an educational market, but to do that they have to first ensure that pupils will not come across inappropriate content.