Week 5

Animation in Primary Schools
This week's lecture was concerned with the use of animation in primary schools.  As the lecture progressed I began thinking that the use of animation would be an exciting and engaging way of developing the English domain for children in primary school.  First of all we looked at Lego films on You Tube.  Most of these have been uploaded by amateur animators but as I quickly discovered the films are very polished and cleverly constructed.

Stop animation is one possibility that children can work with. In our lecture resources there is a great link to Hawthorndene Primary school's claymation experience at http://www.hthdeneps.sa.edu.au/clay

You can see from the pictures how much fun it is.  It would be a great way to develop interpersonal skills with children; working together, creating story boards, making models.  It would also be a great exercise for kinesthetic and visual learners.  As a teacher I would also use it with children to identify and name concepts of film animation and to develop their awareness and understanding of visual narrative: characterisation, theme, stereotype, setting, plot, and sound scape.  They could investigate and identify the different styles used in animated films.  They could identify the different animation techniques: cartooning (Snow White), claymation and pixilation (Robots) and computer generated techniques (Finding Nemo).  I think the use of ICT could also be a great tool for livening up lessons.  Just a short clip could help raise children's energy levels and get discussions flowing.

Digital movies and other creative websites

In the work shop we moved onto digital movies and other useful websites for the use of  ICT in the classroom.  My favourite has to be www.xtranormal.com.  This is a fantastic website which states, "If you can type you can make movies."  And it is that simple.  You choose your characters and setting and then start typing in the dialogue.  There are easy-to-use instructions with icons for camera angle, expression, movement and sound which you just click and drag to your dialogue box.  This would be a fun and creative way of encouraging creative writing with children.  As part of a literacy block you could ask the children to create an extra scene to the book they are reading.  Or you could use it to reinforce the idea of story boards.  Children could storyboard a short scene and then 'shoot it' using xtranormal.  The possibilities are endless.  Here is my attempt below, it took about an hour to create but most of that time was spent familiarising myself with the operation.




Dvolver is a simpler programme to use but its content is probably not suitable for primary aged students.  http://www.dfilm.com/

The zimmertwins is good fun as well at http://www.zimmertwins.com/.  It is another free website working on a similar basis but simpler in use and look.  This might work well when introducing ICT to the younger year levels in primary.  

Greg introduced us to a number of other websites which could be used to foster imagination in the classroom.  Build your wild self is a great website where students can create fantasy images of themselves.  This could be used by students to create characters that they then write a fantasy story about or to create characters to illustrate a fantasy story they have already written.  http://www.buildyourwildself.com/

We also looked at the use of games in the classroom to develop mathematics skills.  One of my favourites was Street Racer from the Sumdog website.  This website is designed to make mathematics fun.  In Street Racer, you race against the computer or other students by answering maths questions.  Correct answers accelerate your car towards the finish line, while incorrect answers can slow you to a halt.  Great fun for kids but also a good tool for encouraging mental calculation.

http://www.sumdog.com/en/Sumdog_games_-_Street_Racer/