Movie Making / Animation Websites

In todays workshop Greg showed us a number of fun and interactive websites. We made movies and designed 'Wild Things' and 'Lego People'. We did a bit of sketching and looked at a website focusing on different types of stories and story activities. One website contained a sustainability game called 'Catchment Detox'.

Zimmertwins

We played around with creating movies on the Zimmertwins website - It was fun. You select all the scenes and add the dialogue. I have inserted an image below showing a section of my movie but it is difficult to see all the options available. You can also click on the website link below to find out more.

The website allows you to select different scenes according to what the character is doing. For example, you would choose a 'talk bubble clip' if the character is talking or an 'action clip' if the character is dancing. There are three characters. Eva, Edgar and 13 (A cat).

I made a movie about Edgar getting lost and 13 rescuing him. However, I wasn't able to save it because you have to become a member of the website.

This website provides good opportunities for students to integrate storytelling with computer animation and building characters through dialogue and movement.

http://www.zimmertwins.com/movie/create

Dvolver Moviemaker

Below is a movie I created using Dvolver Moviemaker

The steps are simple to follow. First you select a background and a sky. Then you select a plot and your characters. You then type in the characters lines and choose some background music (the music can get a little annoying for visitors to your website!!).

Once you've made your movie you can choose to send it to someone by entering their email address. To insert my movie into this blog I selected the code in the white box (by clicking ctrl A) and copied it. Then I went to Edit Html and pasted the code. Then you go to publish post.

This website is a lot of fun and good for making cartoons / movies that tell a simple story. However, it may not be suitable for primary school level as it contains scenes and characters that could tempt children to create movies of an adult nature.

You can make your own movie by clicking on the link below.

http://www.dvolver.com/live/mm.html

Build Your Wild Self

Build Your Wild Self is another fun website that allows students to be creative while also gaining some important knowledge about animals. The students design themselves based on what they look like. They then choose animal features/parts to replace with their regular features. For example, instead of keeping their mouth the way it is they might replace it with a walruses mouth. Which is what I have done below. As you can see there is an information box that talks about walruses tusks. The program also names the wild thing for you. Mine was called a 'Wal-Frog'.

www.buildyourwildself.com

Sketchswap

allows you to do your own sketch and then swap it with anyone in the world by selecting 'submit drawing'.

This could be a good way for students to learn how to sketch with the computer particularly if the school has a tablet available. The simplicity of the sketching tool also requires students to be creative in providing texture and depth to sketches.

www.sketchswap.com

Rollermache

The Rollermache website contains everything kids would want to know about planning and creating animations and films. It would be a great resource for students and teachers.

This website includes four sections:

Inspire - A video gallery of clips from professional animators, filmmakers and artists giving “behind the scenes” tips and tricks to budding creators.

Plan – A section giving suggestions on how to generate ideas for stories, characters, and worlds. This area also provides tools and templates to develop these ideas and concepts towards realisation, such as storyboards and script templates.

Create – This area shows kids how to actually make stuff like animations, flipbooks and zines using what is available on the web for free as well as using bits and pieces from around the house.

Gallery – A place where children can upload their completed video, sound and photo creations to the site for others to see and rate. All uploaded content is pre-moderated before it goes live on to the site.

Find out more by clicking on the following link:

http://www.abc.net.au/rollercoaster/rollermache/

Storygames

This website contains all sorts of reading and writing activities. Greg focused on a Rebus story where pictures replace some of the text (see below). You could show students the rebus story and get them to write their own. It will help them to think about how pictures can be used in telling stories.

http://www.storygames.com/TeachManPF/Rebus.html

Reasonably Clever

If you go to mini-mizers and then classic kid-safe mini-mizers you can create your own mini-figure like a little lego man/woman. My character is at the beach in her colourful bathers and matching hat. She also has a sandwich in her hand. It allows you to choose skin colour, hairtype, clothing, background....

http://www.reasonablyclever.com

Although fun, I feel creating characters like this may have limited application to the classroom. The website is also difficult to navigate through and find the right information, which could confuse students. For instance, there is no page which describes what the website is about and its purpose.

Catchment Detox

Catchment Detox tests you to see if you can successfully manage a river catchment and create a sustainable and thriving economy.

It's an online game where you're in charge of the whole catchment. You get to decide what activities you undertake - whether to plant crops, log forests, build factories or set up national parks. The aim is to avoid environmental problems and provide food and wealth for the population.

This online game teaches children the importance of maintaining a catchment and shows how challenging it is to do so. Find out more by clicking on the link below:

http://www.catchmentdetox.net.au/

Myths and Legends

This site is for pupils, teachers and all those who enjoy stories and storytelling. The tales on this site have been told over and over again. Many are very old and date back centuries, but a few come from only a short time ago.

http://myths.e2bn.org/about/accessibility.php

Photostory 3

Greg recommended downloading Microsoft Photostory 3 so I will have to get onto that.

This program enables the creation of slideshows from your photos and then publishes the slideshows so that they can be emailed or even shown on your television. You can also add special effects such as music or voice narration to the slideshow. Find out some more information on Photostory at the link below:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/photostory/default.mspx

N.B. I used Picasa 3 from Google to create a slideshow on my second practicum. I will have to try Photostory to let you know which one is better.

ICT on Teaching Rounds

During my teaching rounds I used an interactive whiteboard practically every day. I was glad about this because I didn't get the opportunity to use one during my first teaching round.

I used Microsoft Powerpoint a few times to present parts of my lessons. Microsoft Excel was used regularly for graphing as that was our main maths focus while I was teaching. As a class we created column, line and pie graphs. Once confident with excel, students created their own graphs.

I directed them to websites like http://www.melbournewater.com.au/ and http://www.bom.gov.au/. These websites are great for current weather statistics and water storage and water use statistics. Students also had the opportunity to experiment with other types of graphs on Excel.

A major focus for my last two weeks of teaching rounds was The Commonwealth Games. We kept track of the medal tally according to sport type. As a class we graphed Australia's Medal Tally at that time. Below is the table we created as a class. This involved looking up the medal tally at http://www.thecgf.com/games/tally_cat_results.asp and sorting medals into the categories of Individual Sport, Track Events, Field Events, Aquatics and Team Sports (team doesn't appear on this graph because the team events had not commenced at that stage).

Mathletics was an educational program that was used a great deal during my teaching rounds. The students loved it. However, I noticed that a lot of the students were using it to compete online against students from other schools. They would remain on low levels in order to keep their high scores rather than challenging themselves by going to the next level.

I was lucky enough to attend a Mathletics PD session in which the instructor discussed ways of keeping track of what students are doing on Mathletics. It allows you to set a level for each child in your class preventing them from staying on a level that is to easy for them and not providing enough of a challenge. It also gives you the option of setting specific tasks.

I introduced my students to the Dust Echoes website. They loved it although some of them found the stories a bit brutal. There was a quiz linked to each story so the students took the quiz once they finished each story. The quiz contained comprehension questions relating to the story. The students struggled with the quizzes that linked to the stories with no words. The discussions that followed were quite interesting. The students could also make their own version of the story.

I directed my students to the following website on a number of occasions. https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/primary/pages/Default.aspx. The website contains educational activities linking to all aspects of the VELS domains. Some of the topics covered include sports, arts, science, countries, maths, environment, news, Australia, music, health....the list goes on. Students can attempt to make a movie, animate, create, experiment.... I would definitely recommend this website.

At the end of my teaching rounds I prepared a slide show for my students to say thanks for having me. I used photos that I had taken throughout my rounds. I was able to add captions to the photos and also added music. The students loved it and were very appreciative. To do this I used a free program called Picasa 3. Here is a link to a youtube video outlining what Picasa 3 can do. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rskC6c_5L1M. Due to privacy issues I have not placed a link to the slideshow.

Dust Echoes and M&M's

Today we used Inspiration, Paint, Excel and looked at a couple of websites (Dust Echoes and M&M's).

Dust Echoes is a website containing a number of indigenous stories. I chose to watch the video of Moon Man. It told a story about the moon being a man before it was in the sky. I paused the video on important parts of the story. I would print screen and put the image into Paint. I then cropped the image and copied and pasted it into Inspiration and added text to each image. The idea is to sequence it in a way that tells the story. We ran out of time so I didn't get to finish it but you get the idea by looking at the image above. I found the website to be very interesting and it would be a great resource for students to learn about indigenous culture.

Some of the stories are rather barbaric ('Moon Man' was one of those stories). I enjoyed this exercise but it was quite time consuming and like Greg said you wouldn't want students sitting down in front of a computer for this amount of time.

We also played around with Excel today. We were supposed to bring in a packet of M&M's for the activity but most people forgot or ate them before class. We entered colours into one column of excel and in the next column we entered the numbers representing the amount of those colours in the packet.

We created graphs displaying the amount of each M&M colour in the packet. I inserted a background image that I obtained from the M&M's website to link to the content of the graph and make the background more interesting.

The M&M website contains information that could be used in the primary school setting. Some things included are nutritional information, m&m recipes....

Design Brief and Online Games

Today Greg gave us the task of designing a frog that jumps using a small piece of cardboard, an elastic band, a piece of sticky tape and a little picture of a frog. Steph and I worked together to try to design our jumping frog. We didn't have success. The cardboard became flimsy the more we played around with it. The idea was to come up with the best design by first completing a design brief. This task would be perfect for primary school students as it offers a challenge and helps them to understand the importance of brainstorming and planning before jumping into a task.

We also created our own quiz game on the following website http://www.quia.com/web. I created a quiz aimed at younger students. It was about different types of pets. Go to http://www.quia.com/quiz/2513813.html to have a go. (N.B. I recently clicked on this link and it appears that my quiz has been removed). We also created other activities like hangman. Go to http://www.quia.com/hm/668181.html.

This could be good for students to pair up and create a quiz for each other based on something they had researched.

Using Publisher to Create a Brochure

Today we used Microsoft Publisher to create a brochure for a holiday destination of our choice. This involved adding images and pieces of information related to the destination. I chose North Stradbroke Island as my holiday destination. I haven't finished the brochure. I managed to add images and some text.

Greg presented examples of previous students' e-portfolios and spoke about the interview process and how to be prepared for an interview.

We also looked at creating web pages in Publisher. This will assist us in preparing our e-portfolios.

I have used Adobe InDesign previously, which is very similar to publisher however has more of a graphics focus and more flexibility in arranging the page layout. It is a very powerful desktop publishing package however it may be too complex for students and it is more expensive for schools to purchase.

Setting up my blog

I have finally set up my blog. It took a while to think of a blog name but I finally got there. However, it's not very creative.

Today Greg taught us how to create mind maps and concept maps using Inspiration 8.0 IE. He demonstrated how to crop images within MS Paint.

I found the class to be very informative and engaging. It helps when you are given the opportunity to "play around" with the programs and trial the different things you can do.

Inspiration is an easy program to use for people with limited computer skills. It would be great for students of all levels and enables them to focus on the content of the mind map rather than spending time trying to work out how to use the software.