When a bunch of tech geeks get together to, I don't know, plan a Learning 2.008 conference, you can bet that you'll be bombarded with all kinds of swell ideas and find out about all the latest gadgets and useful tools. I don't know how he does it, but Michael Lambert of Concordia International School in Shanghai is always digging up the coolest stuff on the web to use with his students. Well, I just got back from our monthly meeting, and I immediately began playing around with Pencil - a fantastic open source traditional animation program.

With Pencil, you can sketch out your idea in a bitmap layer, and then create a frame by frame animation in the vector layer. As a 'traditional' animation program, it doesn't do tweens- just frame by frame, but if that's what you need (and you do need this), it is an extremely powerful and useful tool. Its also extremely free.

Thanks Mike!