The return of animation

To be honest, I wasn't absolutely taken by the two animation websites, Zimmer Twins and Dfilms, that we used in the last tutorial. I would, quite honestly, prefer something a little more open-ended - something that is less restrictive and would allow students' creative instincts full licence. It would almost be nice to have an activity where an animation was linked to a prior written or storyboarded concept or story - you can't really do that with Zimmer Twins and Dfilms. Not that those two websites aren't useful in their own way, of course... I'm just looking for something more.

I know that many schools these days use a program called Kahootz, or Kahoots, or something. I am not acquainted with it, but it seems to be in wide use so maybe it's what I'm looking for. However, for now, I'm going to take a look at a couple of websites a fellow Education friend has linked me to.

Firstly, let's take a look at Sketch Swap, which you can find by following this linky. Sketch swap is just, basically, a piece of paper and a pen on the internet. Not really what I'm looking for, but a useful tool to keep in mind for the future, never-the-less. Also, it's not all that good for writing accurately. It should primarily be used for a drawing tool in the classroom - however, you cannot change the colour of the pen.

Next, I'm going to have a look at a website called Build Your Wild Self, which you can find by following this linky. Basically, on this website you create a portrait of yourself and then replace body parts with animal limbs, like so...

Sure it's a bit of Art/ICT fun - but could students actually learn anything from this? I don't know - unless there was a discussion about animals and animal body parts and it was part of a larger unit on animals, I doubt it.

I'm beginning to think that these links my friend has sent me have less to do with animation and more to do with potriature. And I can see a link to 'create yourself as a lego person thing' coming up, so maybe I should just leave this blog post here and give Kahootz a try.

So, I came with the promise of animation and discovered potriature instead. Oh well. Doesn't matter. Until next time....

The week animation came to town

Today we're starting off by looking at a website called Zimmer Twins. You can find it by clicking this linky. Zimmer Twins is a fun, interactive website that allows you to create your own animations. Now, this is a superb tool, and I'm sure we could all imagine so many students being drawn to and engrossed with such an activity. What a tremendous and easy way for students to take story writing, story recounts, journal writing or whatever into an exciting new field using ICT. Here's a still from when I just created a little movie.

As you can see the interface is very easy for students to use, with big clear buttons and tabs. Also, there is an easy-to-follow introductory video provided by the website to help you get started creating your creations.

I really do like the ease with which one could use this application. I have mentioned a couple of times on the blog how concerned I am that there are not as many good internet or general ICT resources that are suitable for lower primary. This animation creation website could be used by most - not all, but mose lower primary students, I could imagine. Alternatively, it is also appropriate for higher levels. I really do like that.

After the Zimmer Twins we moved onto a website called Dfilms - linky. Dfilms is another easy to use animation creation website. The only problem with Dfilms is that I'm not entirely convinced that all the content on the website would be suitable for an under-18 audience - I don't know. However, if we don't consider that, Dfilms would be suitable for a more upper primary audience as it introduces vocabulary such as rendezvous and soliloquoy - while introducing concepts of plot/character/genre, etc..

Here's the animation I made. It's a work of art. I'd be pretty massively surprised if I didn't pick up an Oscar for this gem. Anyways, that's it for this week. Bye!

And on and on to the cyber bullying issue

And we begin this week by reading this article from The Age. Linky.

Here is a cyber bullying-related picture.

Firstly, the first paragraph of that article from The Age is absolute rubbish. It heartened me to see this line following it: "With respect to the archbishop, that attitude is so last century." Good.

Um. So there is no doubt that young people today interact with eachother through internet-based social networks to an increasingly massive extent. I think it disingenuous to claim that when we use these social networks we expose ourselves to only the festering underbelly of the worst of human nature. What we do expose ourselves to is the the best and worst of people - in whatever context they come to us. We can, in fact, choose who to interact with on the internet. I think the problem comes when we frequent websites and social networks, online, that allow for anonymity. When one is able to cover themselves with the cloak of anonymity, let's be honest, there is the possibility of them acting out knowing that their identity is safe and therefore they are safe from repercussions.

However, it is also the case that online environments are not as well policed as those in the real-world and bullying taking place at school can continue online. Such online bullying is harder for the teacher to deal with because it can take place at home, with consequences arising also in the schoolyard. What to do? I don't know. There are no shortage of experts in this field trying to answer that question.

For their possible downsides, social networking does improve our technology and communication (yes, it's true) skills, boosts our creativity, exposes us to new and different world views, provides us with a cheap and easy way of keeping in contact with friends and family (whether they're in just the next room, or half a world away). It also teaches us to design and edit content and to share and engage in creative works - poetry, art, photography, and video content. This is all from a study conducted by the University of Minnesota. The study also found that students who frequent social networking sites do better in exams. True!

Perhaps the key to letting exposing the students to the benefits of social networking, while shielding them from the dangers is just, simply, education - and that's something we'll have to do as teachers, and with students from an early age, right through until they leave us behind for high school. There are now a range of interactive websites to help us with this - and it is a big field - we must cover everything from "don't give out your address to strangers", to cyber-bullying.

Let's be honest, social networking is here to stay, for at least the visible future. The benefits of social networking are now becoming clear - we need to make sure students can acess these benefits while being safe. However, nonsense being spouted by people with no qualification to speak in the area - like the archbishop at the beginning of The Age's article - does not help us. It just doesn't. Let's be logical, rational and thoughtful on this issue, and every issue, and not just utterly useless reactionaries, please!

Here's a cute dog.
Bye for now.

Week Four (part two)

Mathematics - Excel and M&Ms
I've decided to split this week's blog post into two - so this is part two!

In this second activity we're using computers to represent data in graph form. We use physical objects (the MnMs) to collect and collate data, we use the MnM website for useful information and images, bringing it all together in Microsoft Excel like the image to the left.

So, very simply, here is a point-by-point explanation of the activity we did today:
1. Take a packet of MnMs, and tally the number of different coloured MnMs found in that packet. Greg gave us a handy hand-out that can be done with pen and paper.
2. Take this information you have collated and place it in Microsoft Excel in the manner displayed at the top left-hand corner of the image - that is, with two coloums, one being 'colours', the other 'numbers'.
3. Highlight this information and use the insert tab to create a graph. I chose a 3D pyramid graph.
4. A nice little touch you can add to the graph is changing the colour of each coloum to the colour of MnM they represent. You can also add a visual cue for the students - a number at the top of each coloum, like I have done.
5. Then get onto the MnM website, use the 'print screen' button to choose and add a nice little image to the information you have graphed. As you can see, I've added an image of the red and yellow MnM characters.

This seems to be an excellent activity introducing (or extending) students' knowledge of Excel, also incorporating mathematics with computers, and trawling websites for useful information and images.

Week Four (part one)

Story Retelling - Dust Echoes
Today's session began with Greg showing us a lovely little flash animation video from the Dust Echoes: Ancient Stories, New Voices website (which can be found here). Greg tells us that we'll be using this website to select, and then retell a story from one of the flash videos on the site by 'Print Screen'-ing and cropping images, before pasting them in Inspiration. This seems like it will be a superb way of engaging students within stories (and not just Indigenous Australian stories). It is also a new and engaging way of retelling stories that I have not encountered before - that is a computer-based, visual retelling.

I chose the video called Namorrodor, which is the story of a creature, signalled into life by a shooting star. The Namorrodor hunts at night and this video is concerned with the Namorrodor's hunting of a baby. However, the baby's mother manages to fight off the Namorrodor before he manages to capture the baby.

The exact method of creating the retelling (the one I created is on the right) is:
1. take 'print screen' shots of the video at crucial points in the story.
2. cut out the relevant part of the shot in Paint and then paste it in the Inspiration program.
3. then arrange the shots in Inspiration in an artistic order - a retelling of the video.
4. perhaps you can add text as well - I did. (I took the text from the PDF document avaliable on the Dust Echoes website).

I'm really quite excited/impressed by this method of retelling. It is not something I have encountered in the classroom and I am sure to put it into use.

Week 3 - Design Briefs/Online Games/other, etc., so forth and so on...

So. Today we are looking at design briefs. I really don't know what the hell they are - luckily we were given paper and information and all sorts of other assorted niceties so I was quickly up to speed.

I am reliably informed that this is the old system of designing: 1. investigate, 2. design, 3. produce, 4. evaluate. That seemed all nice and lovely to me, but apparently it is insufficient to the needs of the sorts of people who involve themselves with design briefs. These aforementioned 'sorts of people' have opted, now, for the following: 1. investigate/design, 2. produce, 3. analyse/evaluate. That's all well and good. But I don't really understand the problem with the old system given that 'analyse' is more-or-less a synonym for 'evaluate' under these circumstance. Never-the-less!... it appears another addition to the newer system is a 'cycle flow' thing that encourages the sorts of people who involve themselves with design briefs to return to investigate/design and undertake the whole process again. Something. I haven't had enough coffee.

Um. My group completed a hard copy of the design brief for the jumping frog activity so unfortunately for you you cannot see it here. However, luckily for you I took pictures with my horrid little mobile phone of the whole escapade. The challenge now is to see whether or not I can get these pictures from the phone to my blog - without the phone deciding to chuck a tantrum. Let's see...

Looks like it's working! That's a photo of Chris preparing for jumping frog launch...

And that's a photo of me holding our jumping frog which was an absolute failure! In my defence, I'm pretty awful with my hands and so forth. Everyone's frogs were much better than ours. It was highly embarrassing.

Despite it all, these sorts of activities do seem incredibly useful. I'm not especially kinesthetically skilled and I'm always thinking of ways of teaching to those who are. These sorts of activities can help, I would imagine. Even the design brief process is no doubt a great way to encourage teamwork, higher order thinking - even literacy skills!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnndddddddddddddddddd... we move on the this website. It's called Quia and you can make all sorts of lovely little quizzes on it - also games and the such. And so we did. I made one. Although the website seems to have deleted it, for some absurd reason - but it's ok, because it seems everyone else's quizzes and games have been deleted too. It seems Quia just hates everyone. Good for Quia.

Anyway, I began by making a quiz about classical music - because that's what I know. We all had the opportunity then to try out eachother's quizzes. I thought mine might be tough, but it was nothing compared to Sarah's traditional spelling of Scottish words quiz! Wowzers, Batman!

Um. Then I tried hangman. I do appreciate that Quia has options apart from a man actually being hanged, because that might be utterly inappropriate in some schools - for example, the school I was on placement at! Incredibly inappropriate given the histories of the students at the school. So, yes, be careful with hangman is the story of the day.

But, yes, Quia appears to be a useful tool for the classroom. Fun, yet also opening up avenues for the reinforcement of content covered in class. I could see students taking and making games and quizzes on Quia, for sure. The only problem would be, obviously, Quia's deleting of these games and quizzes after some time.

Ok. That's it for now. I'm going to get some coffee. I leave you with a picture of a LaTrobe duck I took on my mobile phone while walking to today's lesson. Bye!

(My photographic skills are finely honed.)

Week 2 - Microsoft Publisher and other assorted assortments

Now, right. Microsoft Publisher seems to be the program of the day. I don't think I've used Publisher since, maybe, 1995, to be honest. So, let's see if Publisher today is anything like the program I left behind. I remember Publisher being slightly annoying and irritating all those years ago - or maybe that was just me and my general attitude towards computers and all things. We shall see.

I kind of think that the things you would use Publisher for back then, and now can, these days, be done by newer, better, more advanced programs - obviously Adobe Photoshop or whatever it is springs immediately to mind. Yet, I am completely unable to master Adobe Photoshop so there's no way I would expect a class of students/kids to. Publisher is probably the right tool to use in the classroom. However I feel that these days, Publisher is limited to the classroom and well-meaning amateurs.

We're creating little brochures in Publisher now. Here's an example of what we've all come up with. Visit Laos!

There we are. That's a lovely little example of what you can do on Publisher these days. It's largely what I remember being able to do on Publisher in the past. That's not a criticism - just a statement. It's is, however, easy to use and therefore appropriate for the classroom - middle and upper primary. Once again, I'm really hoping to find ICT resources for lower primary classes - where are you!?

Yes, so Publisher is easy to use, nicely streamlined. Look at all the brochure templates nicely lined up, ready for you to choose them, take them home.

So, yes, Publisher has really not changed. I guess it's found it's niche and is comfortable with it? But, yes, all-in-all, a useful little tool for the classroom.

At this point we move onto e-portfolios. That is, CV-type-thing presented in an electronic format. It turns out that we'll have to submit one of these in this subject. I remember speaking to my sister, who last year - or was it the year before? - completed a DipEd., primary and secondary at LaTrobe's Albury/Wodonga campus. She had to do one of these e-portfolio-thingies. She printed it off, blew it up (in size) and was able to take it to interviews and it proved to be a useful little tool.

I suppose these e-portfolios can't replace the traditional CV, they are, however, a nice little addition to the job selection process. Demonstrating your ease with ICT, while presenting yourself. I can see e-portfolios being of great use to me in the future.

That's all for this week! Bye....