Category Archives: Online Resources

Online Resources

The Scottish Voice

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We had a demo in school of some software to help Dyslexic pupils. During the discussion the Scottish voice project was brought up.

The Scottish Government funds CALL Scotland to provide a Scotland-wide schools licence for ‘Heather’ and ‘Stuart’ – a high quality Scottish computer voice from CereProc in Edinburgh. The voice is licenced for schools, colleges, universities and NHS patients. Heather and Stuart can be downloaded from this web site and are also available on CD from CALL Scotland (schools only). Pupils and students can also install the voices on home computers.

Once installed on your computer, you can use Heather or Stuart with most ‘text-to-speech’ programs to read: electronic books; PDF files (such as SQA exam papers); worksheets and other documents in Microsoft Word. You can also create audio files using the voice. The Scottish Voices can also be used on talking internet browsers to help pupils and students read materials made available on and through Glow.

This software allows the computer to speak with a Scottish voice, and pretty good it is too. Now as much fun as Heather and Stuart are, they are useless without some software. A quick search of the internet will give you a lot of software which ranges in price from free to expensive. The Scottish Voice site also mentions some free software that uses word but I can’t test it at home as it does not appear to work with my setup here, I will test it at work and let you know how I get on with it.

TTSAPP is very easy to work with and allows you to produce WAV (sound) files that can be used in blogs or podcasts. Here is an example I created from the text of this site. I had to convert it to MP3, as Glow Blogs does not allow WAV file types, I used audacity.

I plan to test out these voices with Muvizu and see if I can’t overcome some of the stage fright that appears to be plaguing some of my pupils 🙂

Online Resources, Software

Photosynth

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This has been around for a while and I always meant to get round to using it but there was never the occation. Well this week our pupils have been hard at work creating and designing our new entrance space. We have used a blog to gather ideas and plan a wall display with all the ideas. I wanted a way of capturing the detail of the wall display so I thought of Photosynth.

I took my trusty 5MP class Kodak and went snapping. I had no idea of what to do, so I just snapped away for 5 minutes or so. I took the memory card home (good chance the software won’t work in school) and installed photosynth on my PC. The app appears to be little more than a bulk uploader, I would guess there are some pretty big servers in the Photosynth basement doing the work. It asked me for a name and description then off it went. Pretty soon I had the following result (Press play button for what I think is the best effect)

I was fairly happy with the result but I wanted a nice panorama. I had taken a panoramic shot at the start of the shoot, so fired it into Image Composite Editor and got the following. I even saved it as a PNG, but at 30MB I will keep it off the blog.

So what next? Well I plan to reshoot the whole thing once it is up on display properly.

  • I will use a digital SLR to get a bit more speed on the shoot.
  • The next panorma will be shot in a lot more detail from a single location.
  • The next synth will be tried with those pictures and some close ups of the text.

Oh and as a side note it would have been better if the kids didn’t wite upside down, but that’s round tables for you 😉

All in all a nice little piece of free software 🙂 Oh! did I mention there is an iPhone app of the same name that does the same thing?

CfE, Computing, Games, Online Resources, Software

Muvizu

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I was looking for some easy to use 3d animation software, Alice is nice but not exactly easy to get into.
I found a review on the register and it took me to Muvizu, what a cracking little piece of Windows software. I confess to not having used it for hours (yet) but first impressions are magic.
It does need a OK spec of computer though, so it might not run everywhere you want to use it.  The tutorials appear to be youtube based so I guess I’ll need to learn it all at home.
Computing, Games, Online Resources

Minecraft

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Let me take you back to the early 90’s. PCs ran DOS and windows 3.1 was what you used to get Word working. 286’s were dead and 486’s were the new king (types of processor 80286 & 80486), no one had heard of a Pentium and graphics cards had 512KB of ram on them. This was the era of 16 bit computing, of Mega Drives and SNES (Sony didn’t bring out the Playstation till 1994/95).

Minecraft is a game that captures that spirit, blocky graphics, midi sound & great game play. Minecraft is a sandbox game where players work in huge levels to create structures, think lego but MUCH bigger. You can work in single or multiplayer servers and the levels are all randomly created.As a games design resource it might not be up there with Kodu or a games development environment like UDK but it does allow kids (and teachers) to work together and build incredible structures. Its a long way off to release but give the free version a shot.

Here are some stats lifted off the site today. It costs 10 euros and was developed by a small team of programmers (one or two). 544236 people have purchased the game, this makes it quite an enterprise example as well.

Statistics

In the last 24 hours, 19384 people registered, and 6212 people bought the game.

Games started in the last 24 hours:
Minecraft Alpha: 60399
Minecraft Classic: 47565
3368 players online, in 1047 servers.
1717135 registered users, of which 544236 (31.69%) have bought the game.