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With Tellagami, begin by creating and customizing a character. Although there is not a great deal of variety in virtual appearance, just enough options exist to personalize your character. From there, you choose a background either from a few in the app itself or your camera roll. I love to take a picture at the front of the classroom and have my character introduce me to the class. I have worked with teachers where they introduce the classroom to students or parents with their character in different spots around the room, even on a bookshelf. After you customize your character and background, you can choose how you want your character to talk, either by recording your voice or typing in text. If you record your voice, you have 30 seconds. If you choose text to speech, there are male and female voices with a few different accents. Some quick ideas you might try: * Have your character tell a story. * Pick a person in history and have them introduce themselves * Use a plant cell as the background and have the avatar name and discuss the function of each part of the cell. * Recite a famous poem or speech * Read a poem they wrote * Take a trip or go back in time and describe where the location/time period * Speak in Spanish, French, Mandarin or any language When you are all done, Gamis can be emailed, posted to Facebook, or Tweeted, which also generates a link to share. You can also view your movie online and get the embed code. I could see embedding a whole bunch of these on a class wiki or blog. You can also save them to your iPad Photos, which is what I like to do. From there, Gamis can be combined together in iMovie or incorporated into other apps like Explain Everything. (Greg Kulowic has some great examples of this, as "appsmashes.") Your only limit is your imagination! Using animation with your students can have a profound effect on how they participate in a project. Their work can be liberated when they have the opportunity to separate

Knowmia is a free service that offers a huge library of videos and presentations for flipped lessons. The library is generated by the contributions of teachers. Users of Knowmia's free Knowmia Teach iPad app can create their own flipped lesson videos and submit them to the Knowmia library. I recently learned that you can also submit your Prezi presentations to the Knowmia library.

Microsoft Office 365 for education gives academic institutions a familiar Microsoft Office desktop suite with online versions of next-generation communications and collaboration services. Educators, staff, and students get anywhere access to email and calendars, Office Web Apps, video and online meetings, and document-sharing. FREE

HelloSlide transforms your slides into a rich audiovisual format, recreating the experience of a live lecture. Simply upload your presentation, type the speech for each slide, and HelloSlide automagically generates the audio. HelloSlide gives more exposure to your presentations, making them searchable, editable, and available in 20 different languages. It's simple to get started: Upload a PDF of your presentation to our website. Type the speech for each slide using our editor. Press play to hear your presentation.

service offering free online booklet creation and publishing. To create a book using Simple Booklet just sign-up for a free account and click create. Select the layout template that suits your needs. To add content click anywhere on the blank canvas and a menu of options will appear. You can add text, images, audio files, videos, and links to each page of your booklet. In the field for adding text there is an option to copy from Word documents. Each page of your Simple Booklet can have multiple elements on it. To include videos you can upload your own files or select from a variety of provides including SchoolTube, TeacherTube, YouTube, and others. To add audio to your pages you can upload your own files or again select from the online hosts Last.fm, Sound Cloud, or Mix Cloud. When you're done building pages in your Simple Booklet you can share it online by embedding it into a webpage or you can share the unique link generated for your booklet.

All About Explorers is a site that Russel Tarr tipped me off to this morning. The site, developed by Gerald Aungst and Lauren Zucker, was designed to help students develop their skills in identifying valid information found on the Internet. On All About Explorers students find fake biographies of famous explorers. The biographies do contain information that is in part based on facts, the content is intentionally written to be inaccurate. Applications for Education Teachers who want to use All About Explorers to teach their students to be discerning consumers of information should take a look at the All About Explorers lessons and treasure hunts. The treasure hunts are short activities in which students compare information from multiple sources on the web. The lesson plans are a series of five activities designed to introduce students to web research strategies discerning the quality of information found online. My only criticism of the lesson plans is that lesson four perpetuates the myth that .org domains are generally non-profit organizations and that they somehow have more credibility than .com or .net domains. (A quick glance at martinlutherking.org or dhmo.org will dispel those myths).

Simply type the speech for each slide, instead of recording it, and HelloSlide automagically generates the audio. It gives more exposure to your presentations, making them searchable, editable, and available in 20 different languages.