Animations, Wiki's and blogs. Are these useful resources?

I spoke briefly in my last post about wiki's and the animation that me and lyndsay created.
I mentioned that we could have changed our animation task by collaborating more and working on different groups ideas for different parts of the process. I felt that this would be beneficial for children to do because it would allow them to collaborate more. However, after discussions with others in my group and more thought on the subject I realised just how much organisation would have to go into planning it. I still think it would be a worthwhile task for a class to do but I now realise that it would rely on the teacher having planned everything including resources,groups and time down to the last second. It needs to be planned so thoroughly because if it isn't planned perfectly then children may end up having to stop the task halfway through filming for example. That would result in children losing where they were in the film, things getting damaged and the process would become far more challenging. The task itself will however encourage the children to discuss ideas, problem solve and ultimately work as a team using everyone in the groups strength and helping develop other skills.

The whole animation process is also an enjoy activity that most children are really enthusiastic about which helps motivate them even more.
I created an animation about evacuation in 1st year and I feel that after completing on animation we realised that the similar the plot and characters the easier it is to film and better animation at the end. This time we decided to use only one character and he was performing a fitness video.

Because their was only one character we managed to create our video in the time given and perfect it in the editing stage. Even though you could tell children that it is easier to work with as few characters and scenes as possible, I think that it is only through experience that the children will realise and develop their animation skills.

I have added both animation's to the blog that you can view both and see how having few characters and scenes have helped us create better animation and also you can see how my skills at animation have developed.

Also this week, www looked at the wiki 'Voices of the World' and how that is helping connect with countries and children around the world. We looked at a variety of technology that countries could use then we created our own task for March.
Our task was:

Voices of the World- March Task

Teacher’s site

For March’s task we are going to use Animoto. Animoto allows you to create a slide show and upload audio to accompany it.

The purpose of the task is to share the different ways that countries sing happy birthday.

• Ask your class to photograph and or draw birthday related pictures. (No children included in photos).
• Upload the pictures from your computer to Animoto.
• Use Audacity to record and edit your class singing.
• Upload recording to Animoto.
• Use Animoto to combine the audio and slide show.

Children’s site

The task for March 2011 was created by B.Ed2 students from the University of Dundee. We suggest that all members create a slide show with audio, using Animoto and Audacity. The participating schools should sing Happy Birthday in their own lanuage.

Most of the tasks involved using a slide slow programme of voice reordering device then uploading it to the site. The aim of the wiki is for children to connect with other countries, here their languages and learn about their cultures. My group decided that we liked Animoto the mist because it had a huge variety of pictures, music and video to accompany any recording to image you wanted to display. However, I felt that all the programmes; voki, my plicks, one true media, slide share etc have there own benefits and are all useful for different purposes. For our task however, we felt that Animoto would work best.

This is our finished demonstration video for VoTW.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

We ended this week, by sending our Teddy bears away. Ours is heading to Estonia. The aim of those activity is for us to connect with other countries and find out more about their lives and cultures. We will be creating a bear blog that will shoe each country what their bear has been up to that week, this will result in us commenting on each others activities and connecting. In my first year placement, my class has a project called the V.I.P bear and they pretended he had come to visit from America and that it was their ,job to show him around Dundee. So, I have already observed just how successful an idea like this can be in class. The further benefit of using technology however, is that the children see their bear in another country doing lots of different activity, while my placement class had to take their own picture and just discussed it within the class. With the bear exchange the children get to connect with others and discuss what has been happening in their lives.

I feel that this week has given me a great understanding of the importance of collaboration and I feel that this is a subject I want to look at in more depth. I feel that by researching and reading others opinions I can develop my ideas and thoughts on collaboration even more. My personal goal for next week is to research collaboration especially in technology further to develop my understanding.