I'm in the movies (and you can be too)!!!

I just finished watching myself and some of my fellow Lookjeders depicted as cartoon characters arguing over Applying Literary analysis in Tanach. You might remember that I previously blogged my response to this question which I then posted on Lookjed, the online forum for Jewish Day School educators.

Lookjed chose a hilariously clever way to spoof this and other Lookjed discussions by transforming these conversations into cartoons. They used a free web-based application called Xtranormal which allows you to make movies by converting your text to speech. You just choose a setting complete with cartoon characters, different scene, and sounds from sixteen different templates, enter the text for each each character to speak, and publish your movie.

You can read the 5771 Purim Lookjed with links to all their cartoon videos here. I have embedded the video in which I am one of the "stars" below.



Educational applications
Obviously, this can be a great tool to share with students for creating multi-media projects. Xtranormal even offers an educational section for this purpose. Below are a few examples.

• Watch a project on the Book of Amos created by two of my students here. 
• Here is a video invite created by my school, The Frisch School, for our annual dinner. You can view more Xtranormal videos created by The Frisch School on http://frischdinner.com/.

Give it a try and soon you and your students will be in the movies!!!