I have been fiddling about with a couple of tools of late, Hypershoot and Text2VoiceOver.  Why?  Because they looked promising as ways to do differently what I already do.

For example, Hypershoot touts its ability to take a full-paged shapshot of webpage and put it into a designated “board”. OK, that makes it Pinterest with some extra tools including collaboration, Slack integration, nesting of ‘child’ boards within ‘parent’ boards, and commenting. You can’t take advantage of most of these features without paying.

Here is a board I created for my students as a preview of the tech tools they will be using during our Spring Semester.

15 euros a month for all the bells and whistles.  It has a few curatorial bells and whistles than products akin to it like Pinterest, but is intended more for web development teams hence the Slack integration.  For teachers and learners there are simpler tools that are free including Symbaloo or other very old school start pages like AllMyFavs or Start.io.  It was interesting exploring this, but the freemium model only allows three boards and not much else.

But these kinds of explorations are worth making if only to remind us of how damned good we have it in the the realm of tech tools.  It really is a golden age.

The other tool, Text2VoiceOver is really odd.  I got the feeling that this one could open up some adjacencies, maybe a mashup with screencasting or animated gifs?  I get ahead of myself.

What this tool does is allows you to create text annotations on a video that are computer generate voices.  I create a video and an image of whiteboard writing that I do during class for students unable to attend.  This might prove very valuable annotate what is otherwise a silent video.  I could do the voiceover while I am making the video, but that might be a production bridge too far.

I prepared a text voiceover (a nice British lady) and then submitted the video to generate the final product.  And I wait…at least this time is created all the voiceovers with no problems.  Here is the message I get:

I will give you an update as to how it goes.  Actually, this is usually how it goes as I test new stuff.  Most folks say life is too short to be putting up with this crap, but I find much of interest as I do what amounts to free user testing.  And that’s OK.  I learn a lot as I do this.  I get to think, for example, about the nature of the learner’s experience.  If I can make this work, I get to imagine how it might be helpful to my own learning as I make it and then how it might help someone else learn.  I get a kick out of that.

I wrote support for help.  Updates later.