Animation Domination

The theme of animation this week in Technology Across the Curriculum was very eye-opening. I never knew there was such a huge variety of websites that facilitated movie-making, animation and character building! I could immediately see the potential for this one topic of animation, the creation of whole class stories with each student creating their own section of the story, rewriting stories in their own words, inserting their own ideas into an old story like a fairytale or simply creating their own characters to display around the room.

Dfilm was a great website in which you can easily create a movie and insert dialogue and music quickly, it is a shame that it has some inappropriate characters because it is very simple to use. The aesthetics of the website were very bright and colourful and the inclusion of music choice when creating a movie injected a lot of fun into the movie-making. A draw back is that there only a limited amount of content you are able to put into these movies so any activity involving this website would be limited by this. Here's where you can find my movie>http://www.dvolver.com/live/movies-465832

Zimmer twins was also a great website for creating a movie and had some more options for expression, movement and dialogue than Dfilm. It also shows more realistically what its like to create and edit a movie with the panel down the bottom where you can rearrange shots and dialogue. Being able to experiment with the sequence of the movie along with the expressions and movements gives students many opportunities to assess whether some dialogue or an action works or doesn't work allowing room to make mistakes and correct them.

Rollermache from the ABC Rollercoaster website was great for showing the process of animation, what happens behind the scenes. I believe this would appeal to many kids as they revel in understanding how things are done and how they work. Being able to do things themselves through experiencing these kind of 'behind-the-scenes' videos is exciting for kids because it gives them a sense of empowerment and independence when creating.

'Build your wild self' was one of my favourite websites from this workshop, it was so easy to use and understand, is creative and crazy, involves lots of animal facts regarding the parts of ceratin animals you chose and had links to the New York zoo and the aquarium. As you can see from my picture I created myself as an Ibex-sha-orse-monarch butterfly as I combined parts from these animals! There are so many choices on this website so kids can be given a lot of freedom to play around, as a class you could print them out and hang them around the room or use them to identify each student's tub, locker, bag hook or chair. To create more restrictions you could limit the students to only changing the head, torso, ears, legs, arms or tail of their creation but trying to make the rest look as much like them as possible.

Another great website which fired my imagination was Reasonably Clever, a site based on lego creations. In the Mini-Mizer section I created a little lego character as you can see. The options on this character-building site were very extensive and might overwhelm or confuse some students, this would be a site where you would need to very clear about what the student needs to create. This site has so much potential to be used before, after or during a unit involving Lego for building or perhaps used in Mathematics classes. I believe this site would also engage some students who are really interested in building and/or Lego and may not always be tuned in to other lesson topics, giving them the chance to experiment with materials they can then use in a concrete manner.

Overall, this medium of animation is definitely a worthwhile tool to use in the classroom. There are so many possibilities for activities, lessons, units and projects across so many of the VELS domains and strands using computers and animation. Along with the amazing resource known as the interactive whiteboard, activities like whole class cooperative story-telling takes on a whole new perspective with potential for any student or teacher who can access the Internet and has a great idea explore and create.