Week 5

Animation

This week the focus was on animation. There is an abundance of rich animation resources on the internet and we looked at many of them.

The first is Zimmer Twins (http://zimmertwins.com/). Zimmer Twins allows you to watch short animated videos of the Zimmer twins and their cat 13. In addition to this you can also create your own animated videos using these characters. Unfortunately you cannot save your animations unless your a paid up member to the site. However you can still have a lot of fun playing with this website, and I think this is a great site to introduce students to creating and editing a movie.

Here is a screenshot of the animation I made with Zimmer Twins:

Build Your Wild Self was another application we looked at (http://www.buildyourwildself.com/). This starts you off with a human boy or girl but you are then able to change all the different body parts into animal body parts. I think this would be a great activity for students to do at the start of the year as it give them the creative ability to turn themselves into any creature they wish. This website is also very informative as it provides details about the animals you have selected. This would be brillant for an unit on animals!

Here is me as a Hiss-bat-aka-fro-elly-at-monkey:

We also looked at a number of other animation websites such as an Australian site Rollar Mache (http://www.abc.net.au/rollercoaster/rollermache/), xtranormal (http://www.xtranormal.com/), Sketch Swap (http://sketchswap.com/), Reasonably Clever (http://www.reasonablyclever.com/), and another Australian site Ziptales (http://www.ziptales.com.au/). All theses sites had useful resources that could come in handy in the classroom. I particularly like the two Australian sites Rollar Mache and Ziptales as they contained excellent activities and learning resources, such as storyboarding instructions, that could be very helpful in the classroom. Ziptales unfortunately does require a membership.

Sketch Swap allows you to receive a sketch after you draw one yourself (a bit scary because you don't know what a student we get), here's what I received back:

Reasonably Clever allows you to create little lego characters called mini-mizers, here's mine:

The final animation internet program we explored was Dvolver Movie Maker (http://www.dvolver.com/live/home.html). This website is very simple to use to create short animation videos, but more importantly highlights a critical point about web content. Whilst this program is easy and fun, it contains images and content that is unsuitable for primary aged students. As teachers we must ensure that we never let kids loose on the net. The internet is littered with inappropriate content, even websites and programs that look innocent might have some unsavory pictures buried inside them. Therefore it is important to check and explore all websites we plan to use prior to suggesting them to students. I will keep an eye on Dvolver in case it ever becomes child friendly but for now it remains unusable in the classroom. 

Nevertheless here is sample video I made with Dvolver: