Animation Celebration

Today's lecture focused on the realm of animation. Once unheard of in the classroom, this is now a cheap and effective activity to get children thinking about many areas of the curriculum. First of course is visual design, including choice of medium, and movie setting. Characters must be created and an interesting storyline, which leads to learning about sequencing and storyboarding. Finally there is the technical aspect of the project where children need to learn about filming and editing. I love the idea and can't wait to introduce animation to my own classroom. A great resource for all sorts of animation information is Rollermache, which contains videos of animators doing their work as well as tutorials for better productions. It's run by the ABC and particularly aimed at kids living in rural Australia who may not have access to the excursions and incursions available in the city.


This area particularly appeals to me, because I am an extremely visual learner, to the point where lectures are an almost complete waste of my time unless there is an engaging visual component. I love drawing and design and as a child I enjoyed creating cartoons. Animation also appeals to my logical side (one of Garner's intelligences), as sequencing is very important. For someone like me, the ability to do it all on the computer is fantastic, and for kinaesthetic learners there are opportunities such as claymation and stop-motion video - even as simple as a teddy bear made with split pins to join the limbs. 


We viewed many videos of animation in the lecture and in the workshop, we got a crash-course (somewhat literally, thanks to Internet Explorer) in having a go ourselves. Following is a summary of some of the tools we investigated today. 



Build your Wild Self

This is actually quite fun. With Build Your Wild Self you start with a blank person and change all sorts of things about their features to create a wild creature. There are enough options to make the pictures look like a real person (including several skin colour options), however the real fun starts when you begin to add lemur tails, bat wings, frog arms and all manner of other options. There are probably billions of possible outcomes. 


I like the idea of students using this to create an avatar for social networking sites they use (in fact, I have used mine for the profile on this blog). At the end, it provides information about what each of the animal parts do, and the animal they come from. The site is maintained by the New York Zoos.

Xtranormal
In an odd twist of fate, this afternoon not 2 hours after leaving the workshop I received an invitation to a 40th birthday party next year, in Las Vegas, created using Xtranormal. Prior to today, I had never heard of this website. It's a pretty interesting concept - "if you can type, you can create movies". You simply type what the characters are going to say, and they even lip sync to the words. The technology is still young, and so the animation isn't quite there yet, but it's still pretty impressive. I would, however, expect the text-to-speech to be better given that this is fairly old technology now. 
I'm just not quite sold on the suitability of their landing page for young children just yet, with featured movies such as Baby Mama Drama ("Hot, Unauthorised and Unapologetic"), Babes Behind Bars ("You can never be too rich or too thin... or too drunk"), and Zombies ("All you need is brains").


I took the time to sign up for a free account and create a movie, and I was pleasantly surprised. There were loads of options, many of them payable via a points system (you buy points with a credit card), but this really only applied to actors and sets. The options for voices, camera angles and character options could keep kids usefully engaged for hours. Loading times are quite slow though which could be an issue in classrooms. I did notice that there is a PC program you can use - as I have a Mac, I don't know how good it is.

This is called "How to get fired", and is an illustration of how kids could use it inappropriately. Enjoy. 

Reasonably Clever

Classic Kid-Safe Mini-mizer

This is me, really soon, Lego-style. I think this is a lovely website! You can create all manner of characters in Lego. Imagine the fun you could have making random figures then making stories out of them. I can imagine making a whole lot of these, printing and laminating them and having a tin that kids can draw a character out of when they're stuck for inspiration with their writing. You could also use them for drama activities.

I used the "Classic Kid-Safe Mini-Mizer" - had a quick check and it seems to be much the same as the normal one but without such quality accessories as handcuffs, cat-o-nine-tails and guns.

Ziptales

As this site requires subscription for many of its features, it's hard to know exactly what's offered. There is a 14-day trial for schools, so it would be interesting to find out. It mainly consists of writing tools, which could be very useful. One interesting (and free) feature is the "Make and Do" section, that contains instructional videos of fun things like making parachutes, magic tricks and finger puppets. This could be a useful resource to show kids a good instructional video, so that they could go and make their own.

Myths and Legends

This site contains a "Story Maker" application where you can make your own videos with different chapters, characters, animations and sounds. You can also add your own pictures and sounds, which increases the functionality. It's a little bit fiddly, so would be more suitable for older (year 5/6) children. 
The only limitation is that it didn't load at all in the uni computer labs, and was slow and buggy on my Mac at home. I don't know whether it's the site or the computers I've been using but it just doesn't seem to be quite there yet with stability - and therefore could be very frustrating to use in the classroom. 

Comic Life
I'm a Mac user and have had Comic Life for years. It's a wonderfully easy drag-and-drop interface where you can create comics using your own photos, then add all sorts of speech bubbles, headings and little "POW!" pictures. To be honest I haven't really used it much myself, because I prefer to draw rather than use photos. I notice it has now been released for Windows, which means I'll hopefully be able to use it in the classroom. To be honest, I'm starting to feel the same way about "Marker Felt" font as "Comic Sans MS" (ie: never use, ever, ever, ever, ever...) but I can see the fun application in schools. I'm not in an office anymore!!


Pivot and Stykz
Two free download programs which provide a wealth of opportunity in the classroom.
I first saw Pivot at school where the kids were using it to create scenes about Migration. Most of them chose to do refugee scenes as this was fresh in their mind, even though the teacher reminded them that the percentage of migrants to Australia who come as refugees is less than 7%. The girls are only in grade 6 but they managed to create some pretty amazing scenes in 45 minutes. They have used it before so they were familiar with the workings, but I was enthralled so I went home to download it - only to find that there's no Mac version. Sad face. There is, however, a program called "Stykz" which is like a pared-down Pivot, and has a Mac version. According to the Stykz website the upcoming version will integrate well with Pivot and provide many more features, but the upgrade has been promised for around a year now, so who knows when it will actually happen. The current "release candidate 4" works most of the time but errors do pop up quite often. It's probably not suited to the classroom in its current form.

With both programs, you start with a little stick figure. You can bend him in lots of different ways to find a starting point, then make small adjustments and freeze the frames. I think it needs around 10 frames a second to start looking like movement, so for a 10-second clip you'd need 100 frames. (Some of the kids' animations went for several minutes... I can only imagine how long that took them).
Below is one attempt from the first night I had Stykz:

As you can see, it doesn't take a lot of time to learn the program and get some meaningful results. This animation was created from 75 frames, I sat and did it while I was watching TV.

There is also the ability to create custom objects, such as the bird above. A lot of the kids made cars, structures for the characters to run up and fall off, and all manner of different things. Using Pivot, you can import .jpg backgrounds which are easy for the kids to create in Paint and provide a well-rounded scene. 

I can see many uses for this in the classroom, for example as above, a response to a big issue such as refugees. You could have the class illustrate scenes from a story, or even create stories from their animations. 

I did have one idea, I don't have much of a basis for this but it's kind of a fledgling thought. Children who are on the Autism Spectrum often cannot read body language, and therefore struggle with many forms of communication with their peers. A program such as this where there are no faces, and no speech, could be a valuable tool in educating these children about what certain gestures and social conventions mean. Just a thought.


More...
There are loads more sites that offer animation and comic strip functionality, and here is a list of a few more...
Zimmer Twins - very simple movie maker for young children. Sign-up required.
Toondoo - create comic strips. Schools (kid-safe) version available. 
KerPoof Studio - make animated story scenes
Pixton - create comics online
Bit Strips for Schools - comic strip creation, safe for schools.

Dud Sites
With the good also comes the bad. Below are the sites we were shown today that really didn't meet my quality standard. 


Sketch Swap

I can't see any academic value in this website. Basically, you sketch something and press send, and then you receive a sketch someone else has done. It's sort of entertaining once or twice I suppose because you don't know what you'll get back (contributing to the lack of suitability for young children, of course). I find it kind of hard to believe also that the "live swaps" are all genuine, because I'm sure many people go to the site like me and draw something very basic, however every drawing that came back in the workshop today was intricate (example to right). 

Dvolver
Dvolver is a movie-making application that I feel would be particularly limiting in the classroom. First, it contains extremely inappropriate characters (eg. "Sexyy [sic] Woman"). Secondly, you are required to enter an email address before being given the code to embed on a website. I don't trust sites that ask children to enter email addresses. (Not only that, but my uni email address, which has never had any spam before, got its first spam a few hours after signing up... coincidence?) Thirdly, in the workshop nearly everyone's browser crashed while adding the movie to our blogs. Finally - the embedded video starts playing automatically when the website is loaded and cannot be paused or stopped - therefore it has been deleted from my blog! I will not be using this website again. I wonder whether perhaps the name indicates that it is in fact doing the opposite of evolving?

The Bat and the Butterfly

My storyboard from "The Bat and the Butterfly"

Today's first task was to watch an Aboriginal dreamtime video from the ABC's Dust Echoes site and then re-tell the story using screenshots from the video. I chose "The Bat and the Butterfly", a story about a girl who is abducted and kept prisoner in a cave. Her family is unable to rescue her and eventually she turns into a butterfly to escape. Her kidnapper turns into a bat and chases her, but is chased back into the cave by her family.

The videos are actually great because they're not in a "storybook" format that children would be familiar with. Each video has different artistic styles (mine was claymation, Eliza's was more of an oil painted canvas) and the children will need to think carefully about what is happening. Once they have watched the video they need to identify the main events from the story, and create a diagram using Inspiration. My diagram was fairly basic, however others in the class designed some quite elaborate creations and it will be interesting to see what children come up with.

It's a useful exercise for the classroom to have children pinpoint key events, and filter for important information.


M & M's Maths

Clearly if you involve chocolate, 90% of your students are sold on the spot. (The other 10% are whinging about a friend of a friend who has a peanut allergy). Even 35 postgrad students were enthralled for minutes doing this activity.


There's an application for all age groups here. For the very young, simply sorting the candy into colours is helping to develop those logico-mathematical skills that form the basis of maths ability. Middle primary school students can colour in bar graphs to show the number of each colour, and talk about the results compared to the website statistics. 

For older primary students there is the opportunity to bring in some rich Excel work, and create colourful, annotated graphs with pictures and meaningful information. Eliza's chart was even prettier than mine, with pie pieces in 3D and in exploded view. The possibilities for children are fantastic, and having coloured M&Ms provides incentive to work out how to make each data set a specific colour. They can pull information from the M&Ms website and from other sources to include on their graph. 

While I understand that there are severely anaphylactic children in schools who cannot tolerate peanuts, I also think the world has gone a little mad (some schools have banned cooking altogether in panic). With the growth of healthy eating programs and schemes such as kitchen gardens, I think schools will eventually settle into a sensible plan for children. If there are peanut-allergic children in the class then obviously, this is an inappropriate activity, however otherwise I have no problem using it. 


Other suggestions for materials to use instead of M&Ms were alphabet soup mix (good, but 26 possibilities makes for a messy graph), Lego (fun - but I really like M&Ms website statistics of colour probability), and counters or play-money. You could even use something that kids like more, such as Beanz or footy cards, and this would also lead into studies of probability - eg if you buy 15 packets, what is the chance you'll get that one "special" one?

 

Ribbit

Design Brief

Design Brief


Problem to be solved: Make a frog jump.
Materials: 1 paper frog, 1 strip of cardboard, 1 rubber band, 1 piece of tape 6cm long.


Mary and I used a Design Brief form to come up with ideas to make our frog jump. First we thought we should twist the rubber band and somehow use the stored energy, but we couldn't work out how to do that. We then thought about some sort of slingshot where you flicked the rubber band, but that didn't work either. 

Our leaping frog design

Finally we thought of making a hole in the cardboard and poking the rubber band through. I originally put a pen in as an anchor, but as that wasn't part of the materials I cut a small piece of cardboard off. At this point we realised we could sit the frog on the little "shelf" we'd made, and when we pulled and released the rubber band, he was flicked off the cardboard. We also realised he would travel further if he was heavier, so we cut another small piece off the cardboard strip and stuck him on. We tested it and the frog jumped about 2 feet.


I didn't see some of the rest of the class designs but when we demonstrated ours, the frog jumped over onto the other side of the desks - maybe 4 feet. It wasn't a competition to see how far he could go, but I think ours would have won!!

Distance our frog jumped

This was a really engaging task that most people in the class enjoyed. Some pairs didn't get their frog to jump, but most had a reasonable go at it. The hard thing was knowing what to write on the design brief, I should have asked for more guidance afterwards so that I can model it properly for the students when I do it. 


Greg said that he did some sort of project like this at least once a week with his students, linking to the current unit. I love this idea, as it will get them doing hands-on activities, thinking about properties of materials, and writing their process. It could be a good springboard into other literacy and numeracy activities as well, eg: 

• Write about the day from the frog's perspective, why did he want to jump? How did he feel about your efforts?
• Average the distance your frog jumped over 3 tries. Graph the class results, find averages, means and medians.

Quia Games

We signed up for 30-day trial accounts with Quia Web, which, despite the unfortunate pronunciation of its name, is a surprisingly useful Web 2.0 tool.
You can create a class by signing up your students with free student memberships, and then tracking their progress. It allows you to create a class page with a message for the students, sign up each name and have the usernames/passwords emailed either to you or to each individual student, or both. One nice feature is the use of the child's name as the username with a number attached, and a word with a number for the password - "glad51" is a far better password for a child than sT0#xXn@.

Challenge Board Game

Once you have your class, you can create activities for them. These range from all sorts of quizzes (true/false, multiple choice, ordering, unscramble etc) to games like Rags to Riches (much like Millionaire), Challenge Board (a bit like Jeopardy) and the ever-popular Hangman. Note - if you don't like the hanging, you can use other variations. One I really liked was Scavenger Hunt, which asks students to go to particular websites to answer the questions.

Quiz questions

The assessments are nice and they are fun activities, but they act more as a summative assessment in many cases because even if the student repeats the quiz, they really only have to memorise the right answers in most cases.


Where the real learning starts to happen is when you have your students sign up as instructors, and create the games themselves. Getting them to do it this way means that the learning is almost hidden - they're not just learning for the sake of it, they're learning so they can test all their classmates! Even in the 20 minutes we had to create a quiz, everyone quickly learned how to use the controls, so it's not hard to use.

This Week's Lecture - Safety Online
The focus this week was safety online, both for students and teachers. Greg pointed out that security for teachers is important. Personally, I have my Facebook site locked down so tight that you can't even find me in Google. Most people don't realise it's even possible to lock down information from specific people (including people who are on your friends list), but it is. The other important thing is that I value my role as a teacher, so I'm not out getting smashed all the time with people taking photos and posting them on Facebook. I think a lot of people don't consider their public profile and then blame the technology when they get caught. You wouldn't stick photos of yourself drunk on the local bus stop; why would you put it on your Facebook profile?


The other side of the coin is more obvious, and pertains to the security of the students themselves. We need to teach them explicitly how to behave responsibly and safely online, and this means respecting others as well as protecting themselves. Greg's answer to this was to have students use "safe" search engines only, rather than Google, but I'm not sure that this is the answer. Certainly in lower primary, Internet use is best designed by the teacher and actively supervised. But a student in grade 5/6 is certainly using Google at home and at friends' places, and probably the local library, so it's up to us to instill good values and ethics when it comes to the use of search engines. Of course Google will give results that are useless or inappropriate, but that's where teaching smarter searching is useful. The worst thing we could do for these children is let them reach high school without having learned how to do their own Google filtering.


Parents will be a great ally in teaching children how to behave online, and I think that the more communication with the parents, the better. This sort of thing needs to be addressed at the beginning of the year, and preferably face-to-face. Let's face it, many adults don't know how to use Google correctly, so why not involve the whole family, send out some search engine activities for them to do at home? The more correct exposure to technology, the better, and ultimately it's probably at home that the students will have the most access to the internet, so having the family involved could be the difference between appropriate and inappropriate behavior.


The Department of Education has clear processes to follow when confronted with a case of cyber (or other) bullying. You can download the Student Supervision document, and cyber bullying is in section 4.6.2.4.7.2. It is interesting to note that this is in the section for "child abuse and neglect", and not "bullying". To me that shows that even the Government still sees "cyber-bullying" as a strange and incomprehensible beast. Really the only difference is that cyber-bullying is non-confrontational and can be anonymous (or at least the bully hasn't realised he's left a digital footprint). This, however, really is no different from writing "Sarah is fat" on the toilet door or the bus stop, or slipping a nasty threatening note into someone's bag or locker. The sooner adults stop sensationalising what is just a modern form of bullying, the sooner we can get to the roots of the problem and explicitly teach children the behaviour we want them to display.


There are a growing number of resources to combat Cyber Bullying. Unfortunately I think this has become a buzzword, and the word "cyber" conjures up either "cool" (Gen X), or "scary" (older adults), depending on the age of who you're talking to. I remember at school when we learned about drug education and the teachers kept using words that felt like they just didn't get us - I suspect it's the same thing with upper primary school children and the Internet - "cyber" probably means "daggy" to them. We have to be careful not to talk down, and to really address these issues appropriately. Otherwise it just becomes an exercise in "how not to get caught". 

ePortfolio

ePortfolios are useful in two ways: first, to get a job and second, to implement in classrooms. Next year, the Ultranet is going to be the main way to create ePortfolios so using Publisher seems a bit outdated.
However, for my own ePortfolio I will use iWeb, and in fact I actually started this over the weekend. I now have extra sections I want to add and areas where I will enhance what's already there. Hopefully it will print nicely, I don't think it should be too hard. The screens I've used aren't all that big.

We started our session today with a discussion of what sections are in an ePortfolio, and then about the actual application and interview itself.

Diving in California - 20 mins worth of Brochure Design

Using MS Publisher, we first created a brochure of "the ideal holiday destination". I chose scuba diving in California, and with the clunky controls of Publisher managed to get something knocked out. Obviously in 20 minutes, not much actual design went into it. I just find Publisher really clunky to use, and user-unfriendly even to the point where the "print preview" displayed in black & white, with the "colour" button disabled. Their clip-art hasn't changed since the 80's and it's always horribly ugly. The seriously unattractive templates don't give children any examples of a well-designed layout, and they look daggy and unprofessional. Compare to a piece of software called Pages, which runs on the Mac. It's equally supported in industry (ie, not at all) but you can certainly export PDF files for printing. It's user-friendly, easy and quick to learn, and things just work the way they should, intuitively. If you add a circle and start typing, text will appear in the circle. Sounds simple but try doing that with Publisher. I actually even think that teaching children page layout on PowerPoint would be better than Publisher as it's far easier to use.

I feel that if you want children to learn more about creating publishing documents, either you'd find a user-friendly software product, or go all-out and teach them inDesign which is the industry standard. MS Publisher is not a cheap product, so why not spend that money on something that is actually going to be useful going forward?

Screenshot of the sample website created with Publisher

Our second task was to create a website using Publisher. Again, same thing. iWeb and countless Windows software products will do a far better job at creating a website than Publisher, and will be easier to actually upload and support across multiple platforms and browsers.

Reflection on this week's learning
This is just so basic. The lecture was good, about the student ePortfolio, but I feel like today's workshop time has been wasted. There's no way I'm using MS Publisher for my assignment, and while I understand that other people don't know how to use it, I would have loved to be given an extension task that actually challenged me. I feel like for most of this Dip Ed course, my brain doesn't even get engaged and I spend nearly all of my time waiting.

We are in a computer lab, and yet we spent 50 minutes listening to Interview techniques which could have been covered in a lecture, or better yet in one of our Issues workshops. It's not that the material isn't worth covering, it's just that we have so little time in the computer lab as it is, and wasting that time not using computers is, well... wasting time.

Inspiration 8 IE - Use and Ideas

Inspiration 8 IE - a great visual mapping tool that does both mind maps and concept maps. It's really easy to use because of the drag and drop interface. There are enough pictures supplied with the program so that meaningful work can be done without too much program knowledge - excellent for play! When the images get boring it's a very simple copy/paste to get new ones from the internet.

There's a 30-day trial on the Inspiration website so towards the end of term so I might download it and watch the supplied "Learn to use" training videos for ideas to use with a class.

Concept Maps
Inspiration looks like a great tool for things like family trees and food webs, and could be used as an activity in a literacy program to discuss plot, character and setting. The picture to the left is a concept map.

Greg outlined a great task of giving kids a shopping list, and getting them to group items according to where they are in the supermarket. Even a basic sorting activity could be made more interesting using this software. In a literacy activity you could get the students to sort characters into families, or age groups.


Mind Maps

These are a similar sort of arrangement actually but with different graphics. I think the main difference is that on a concept map you can interlink, however on the Mind Map example at the right you couldn't link an orange item with a green one.

With a mind map you could use colours consistently, eg green for environmental concerns and whatever other colours the children want to assign. In this way it could easily provide a visual basis for thinking about new topics.
The mind map feature would be useful for creating a dichotomous key in Level 4 - even making a classroom "Guess Who" game. I actually think it would be a great tool for creating "Choose Your Own Adventure books" - the students could list the flow of events, create a page for each one and mix up the order in the book.


You could make probability diagrams easily with a mind map. It could also be a way of creating fixtures for sporting tournaments like tennis. It's a pity the Australian Open is in the school holidays because that would be a great relevant topic - unfortunately by the time the children come back to school everyone's over the tennis! For a French LOTE class you could do this during the French Open and even integrate it with tennis skills in PE! All from one mind map.



Classroom Practicalities
One important note from today was not to teach children all the features of software at once - give them a 10-minute overview and then set them free to play. I know I learned far more by playing than I would have by watching someone click around a screen. Everyone's brain is wired differently and different features spark interest at different times. If those sparks aren't kindled then ICT could become an unwelcome chore for children.

The children would be able to come up with tons of uses for this software that I haven't thought of. I'm looking forward to finding out how kids think by watching what they do with the pictures and what connections they make. 

This week's lecture

To be honest, I took very little away from today's lecture. I already have a very high level of ICT knowledge so today's introduction didn't fill any gaps. This subject should have been run at the start of the course, as I have already gone and looked for many resources for schools on my own. Bringing this in at the end, for me, is not adding much to my knowledge bank.

However, next week's discussion on ePortfolios will be interesting as it's time to start putting together job applications. I figure the more strings in my bow, the better. I'm also excited to find out about some more things I was unaware of, like Inspiration.