When I first heard about MoveableLife.net I thought it had to be too good to be true. I mean, Second Life in a browser? C’mon… No way. I mean, we all know that Second Life is pretty processor intensive. Not as much as many games, but running it from within a web browser? No way!
Well, it’s true! BUT, not quite the way you think. You can log in to Second Life, and you can take a few actions, but it’s hardly the full SL experience. For example, you see who’s online, chat with friends (voice and text), see your inventory, and scroll around the overhead map. You can’t actually see what’s going on in world at all, change your clothes or move objects around in your inventory. So it’s pretty darn limited.
So while it may not be the full featured SL solution you’re looking for, it is a nice step in the right direction. And let’s face it, often the best part of SL is the conversation 
If you haven’t seen this video yet, I think you’ll enjoy watching it. While the message itself is pretty solid, the craftsmanship of the digital story is brilliant.
As you’re watching it, just imagine in your head the script and storyboards it must have taken to create this.
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=-4CV05HyAbM[/youtube]
As a former kindergarten teacher, it sometimes seemed like my life revolved around KidPix. And while it had a bazillion features packed into it, when you got right down to it we spent 90% of our time creating pictures and slide shows.
While there had been a few open source programs similar to Kid Pix (anyone remember Tux?), they don’t hold a candle to one of my new fave’s for lower elementary/early childhood, Kerpoof! You can make books, pictures or stories.
Just choose a background, and start dragging the clip art onto the page. Yes, you can resize, rotate, and move them all. What’s interesting is that they incorporate the concept of scale! Put a penguin on the picture. If you move him towards the back (farther away) he gets smaller. Bring him into the foreground (closer to you) he gets bigger! You can always resize them manually, but it does a pretty good job on its own. That’s not the only dynamic piece. In the arctic background, all the chunks of ice are live. You can move or delete them to your hearts content. Same thing with other backgrounds. When you drag a sun into your picture, it figures out automatically if it should be in front of the mountains or behind them. If the sun is low in the sky, you’ll get a beautiful sunset on your picture. Drag the sun up to the top and it’ll turn the sky to noontime! Drop the sun way down low and the picture turns to night with the sun invisible. VERY cool.
And what’s the cost of Kerpoof? Oh yeah… Free. They even have a teacher section with a few ideas for using it in the classroom. Only thing two criticisms from me. 1) I’d love to see some drawing tools in there so kids can add their own free hand stuff. And 2) They need code to embed the resulting projects into web pages and email them to friends. I had to do screenshots instead. Well worth checking out!
I gotta tell you, ever since I saw my first photomosaic, I’ve been in love with them. Stand back and you see an image. Zoom in and you see it’s actually made up of hundreds of teeny tiny related images. Incredibly cool.
I just found a new site called Mosaickr that let’s you create your own in just a few minutes! Couldn’t be easier, especially if you have Flickr. Just link it up to your Flickr account, choose your master image, choose what images you want it to be made up from and let it work its magic. I chose a photo of Aiden (no surprise there) and then picked out a few photosets of him for it to draw upon. To make a ‘large’ mosaic, it requested that I submit 300-500 photos. It’ll grab photos at random though if you don’t want to pick them all out by hand. After a few minutes of processing, voila! You have a photomosaic.
I started with this photo:
and got this mosaic of it!
It’s a little small, but every image in there is a photo of Aiden. Neat, eh? I could also order a high res copy for .99 Euros (about a buck) or order a poster of it. It’ll even give you a list of all the photos that it’s made up of.
Classroom idea: Let your students go nuts with the digital camera. Have each student take 20 photos of something. Then take all the collective photos, and make a photomosaic from it! Have your students take 400 photos of triangles, and create a mosaic of a giant triangle. If you’re studying colors or rainbows, assign kids to wear different colors for a day and then take pictures of them throughout the entire day. Then use those photos to create a mosaic color chart or rainbow!
Got any ideas of your own? Share a comment!
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