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This morning I was out at Campie Primary School visiting Alicia MacFarlane and her P6-7 class. This morning I was there to help the pupils use the application CrazyTalk. As discussed earlier this year the pupils would use CrazyTalk to tell a story that they had written in Chapters. They are working in groups for this activity. The first group to finish their series called their story ‘The Island of Belle’.

Here is the first episode:

island-of-belle-1.wmv

You can hear episodes 2,3 and 4 over on the class weblog. Their work is really impressive. I don’t think I heard one awkward pause, ‘hmmm’ or ‘emmm’ through out. Well done to the pupils involved. I am very much looking forward to hearing the other group’s series

It is probably worth me mentioning a couple of technical issues that we encountered with the program. While it is an easy application to use it was not a smooth process exporting the final product. Firstly the audio that the pupils had recorded was in an MP3 format. The CrazyTalk software doesn’t support MP3s. This meant that Alicia and her pupils have had to convert their MP3 files into WAV files using iTunes. These were then transferred (via USB) from the iBooks to the PC desktops, as CrazyTalk is a PC application. It is a rather circuitous way to create the finished file, nevertheless worth it. Finally before exporting the finished product, we needed to make sure that it was save as a WMV file. This allowed us to upload it onto our EduBuzz weblog platform (Edubuzz can be a little bit fussy with audio/visual files).

We would be interested to hear from anyone who has had more experience with CrazyTalk as we are pretty much self taught so far.