Blue Ribbon Technology November/December 2003
By Linda Lindroth

The use of multimedia in the classroom has grown as more applications have become available that make it easy for the novice to work with audio, video and graphic animations. This month's software reviews focus on these tools that can help you use multimedia in your classroom.

MovieWorks Deluxe
Student projects will look professional with the help of MovieWorks from Interactive Solutions, Inc. Users can create slide shows, movies, dynamic presentations and interactive CDs. Features include an authoring/presentation tool, animation editor, video editor, sound editor and paint/photo program.

You can input CD audio, MP3, MIDI, WAV or AIF files and even record and edit narration. The graphical interface makes it easy to add music anywhere in your production and determine the time sequence of each sound file. You can even add special effects.

Students can animate any picture, import gif animations from the web and edit to control the animation path, scale and timing. Students will love learning with 2-D cel animation.

The main program in this suite is the authoring tool. Whether your students are working on a slide show or a multimedia presentation for an interactive CD, they'll be able to link to pdf files and web pages, build menu-driven button links to different media files or add text and titles.

The program includes more than 300 MB of royalty-free movies, backgrounds, images, music, MIDI, VR, animations and 3-D files. It's easy to import any file or group of files using the drag and drop feature.

You'll love using MovieWorks to share instructional curriculum as QuickTime or AVI movies via e-mail or by posting them to your school's web page. A great year-long student project could be the creation of a class scrapbook movie.

Call 925-734-0730 or visit www.movieworks.com for a 15-day trial, to download the free player or use the online tutorial. Mac/Win; $99.95.

Criterion Online Writing Evaluation
This subscription service from ETS Technologies is designed to evaluate writing skills for students grades 4-12 through college levels. There are more than 125 essay prompts available. Teachers can also create their own topics for essays. The Management option lets you assign essay topics to the whole class or individually.

Students can submit their essays for immediate, holistic scoring. The overall score is supplemented with diagnostic feedback from the Critique Writing Analysis Tools, which analyze elements of grammar, usage, mechanics, style, organization and development using examples from the student's essay.

Students can get help during revisions by using the comprehensive writer's handbook that comes with the program. Teachers can add their comments either within the essay or on a message board. All essays and feedback are stored in a secure virtual portfolio, which can be accessed by the student or teacher.

Turn anyone – from the Mona Lisa to your fifth graders – into a computerized "talking head" with CrazyTalk.

CrazyTalk
CrazyTalk from Reallusion makes it possible to change any photo or image into a "talking head" complete with animation and sound. You and your students will have fun creating presentations about famous people and events. A quiz on the presidents can include clips of their speeches as a presidential photo "talks." Recreate the "I have a dream" speech of Martin Luther King, Jr. Add a student's photo to your online directions and let him or her do the talking.

It's easy to create animations. Just import any digital picture, use the unique wireframe tool to match your picture to the animation, record the message and apply the emotion.

CrazyTalk animations can be added to slideshows and websites. You can also send a CrazyCard with a talking message or CrazyTalk instant messages. Visit the Reallusion website for tutorials on each project. There are CrazyTalk ImagePacks for Literature, Math and Science, Holidays, Animals and Paintings & Artwork. Each $14.95 ImagePack has 30 ready-to-animate models. The curriculum possibilities are endless with these additional images.

For more information, visit www.reallusion.com or call 408-350-1693. Win98 and up; $49.95.

The Map Detectives
This engaging simulation from Tool Factory provides students in grades 2-6 with map skills practice as they try to solve thefts at Hartley Manor. Students unfold the colorful maps for Sherston County and take on the persona of detectives. Each time students play the game, the plot changes with different clues and suspects, making each game unique and challenging.

From the opening screen, where there's a choice of two mysteries, students make decisions that affect the outcome as they reinforce their geography and mapping skills. The Village Mystery requires students to type in map coordinates to locate missing items. Clues based on suspects' personality profiles help to identify and capture the thief. The Daylight Robbery sends detectives to different parts of town using grid references, compass directions, distance and scale to locate witnesses and gather clues.

Geography and mapping skills get a fun boost from Map Detectives.

An Options menu offers three levels of difficulty for both the mapping skills and the mystery difficulty. Game length can also be changed to make it easier to solve a theft in just one session. Teacher controls also let you select how many maps students will have to use to solve each mystery.

Help sheets for each mystery offer suggestions and reinforce mapping skills that the student detectives will need to solve the crimes. The Village Mystery Help Sheet reinforces the use of the map legend and provides reprints of the plans for each location of a missing object. Reproducibles for the Cycling Map, the Walking Map and the Underground Map reinforce skills learned in The Daylight Robbery.

For more information, visit www.toolfactory.com or call 800-220-8386. Mac/Win; $59.95.

United Streaming
Unitedstreaming by United Learning is Internet-based delivery of video correlated to core content and state standards. Each school license comes with the rights to unlimited use of more than 2,000 core curriculum video programs that are broken down into more than 12,000 video clips that support national standards for math, science, language arts, social studies and health. Many of the videos also have accompanying teacher guides and blackline masters. Teachers can view the video clips via streaming, or by downloading the clips to their desktops.

A new online calendar lists events for each day and provides links to relevant video clips and full-length videos that will tie into your curriculum. The calendar even lists the running times and suggested grade levels for the videos.

The school administrator can assign passwords to teachers and groups to control video access for different groups or grade levels. There is also a teacher Playlist Manager that allows the teacher to store selected clips for later use. The Search function lets the teacher search by keyword, subject, grade, publisher or by curriculum standard and then order the results by relevance, copyright or title in ascending or descending order.

Call 800-323-9084 or visit www.unitedstreaming.com for more information. $995 for a K-8 school license.

Linda K. Lindroth is Technology Editor and Web Coordinator for Teaching Pre K-8. She is also a Technology Resource Teacher in a K-5 computer lab in Lexington, KY.

November/December 2003, Vol.34, No.3