explee a useful tool for creativity

I spent a couple of hours this morning exploring some of the tools under the 'creativity' theme. It felt very uncreative as I fumbled around without seeming to make much progress. Still I found I could embed the neat AnswerGarden tool in my blog. I tag my blogs but I can't turn these into word pictures so I think this will be useful. Also I am now aware of some tools I didn't know before and I can now hold a conversation with my kids about instagram.

In this blog I want to share a recent experience I had using explee.

On a wet Sunday two weeks ago I was sent a link by Chrissi Nerantzi to the explee animation tool and my son took the trouble to follow the link and gave me a glimpse of what it could do. It's a powerful, intuitive drag and drop tool for creating short animations which can be uploaded to youtube. I love animations and over the years I had financed and participated in a number of animation projects and I know how expensive and time consuming they are to produce so I was really excited about the possibility of being able to produce one for myself.

The next day I had a go at making my own animation through a process of trial and error. Over an hour I managed to create a 30 sec clip introducing our conference which I embedded in the conference website. In doing it I knew I was trying to achieve something specific. Looking back I can see that I had engaged in a piece of personal development through which I learnt how to make an animation using the tool.  It was very satisfying to make something so quickly and so easily. I also felt that I was being creative and the clip I produced, being entirely new to the world - was I guess a product of my creativity. More importantly it did a nice job of bringing our static web page to life.

I am in a band and we are going to do a charity gig to raise money for a little boy called Ollie who has a medical condition that needs treating in America. We were just about to promote the gig when I discovered explee so I did a short promotional animation for our website.

I wanted to get better at using the tool so  a few days later I tried it on a story I had created for my grandson. It's the story of how I came to call my company Chalk Mountain and I had commissioned an illustrator to some drawings for me to bring the story alive. I'd had the idea that I could create a business out of this but at the time I couldn't see how I would animate the stories without a great deal of expense.  My six year old grandson happened to be around yesterday and he watched it four times and loved it. The insight I gained from this use of explee was about how new technological tools can help bring an idea that had been dormant into practical existence. Also when personalised in the way it had helped me communicate the meaning of something that was important to me in my life to my grandson in an entertaining and very special way. 

It also illustrates that a creative product can be brought together through activities at different times with different people. The story was written and recorded and the illustrations done over a year ago but they were only connected through the animation a few days ago.

Two days ago I had an email from a talented illustrator I had worked with in the past. It was a speculative email enquiring about possible work opportunities. I emailed back to open up conversation about a possible role as an artist in residence - over 3 or 4 emails I tried to draw him in and he eventually agreed. I was delighted and immediately created a new web page to host information about our two artists. I then spent the best part of two hours creating a new explee animation to show off his work and posted the video clip on the web page and emailed the illustrator to let him know. He loved it and I felt I had in a small way added value to  the work he had originally created by giving it a whole new context and meaning and turning it from the static image into a lively animation.

Staff at Explee are noticing what people are doing and they picked up my work and invited feedback. So I am now entering a conversation about how I found it to use and commenting on my experiences and what else I would like ffrrom the tool. It's a great example of an organisation gaining feedback from its users to enable them to understand how to make their tool more useful.

I found explee easy to use, the process of using it was enjoyable in spite of the mishaps that inevitably happen when you try something new. My use of it was not planned it was all in response to situations that emerged through the circumstances of my life and there was no way that I could have anticipated these activities in advance of them happening. There were just needs, interests and opportunities for products that the tool could help with. The tool and me were in the right place at the right time.

Reflecting on the topics underlying BYOD4L... the explee tool enabled me to 'connect' - existing resources developed for other purposes, 'communicate' in a range of contexts with a  range of audiences in interesting and memorable ways. It enabled me to honour previous  collaborations' and nurture new collaborations by giving the products of those collaborations a new lease of life. It enabled me to  'create' - bring entirely new things into existence from the circumstances of my life perhaps this is another form of connectivity within an individual's ecology for learning.


Guilia Forsythe Wisdom is an outcome of learning