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.

Is collaboration always best?

We start this weeks lecture but having to sort out our groups for the third time. We have been collaborating with the modern languages elective on making a movie and have been struggling to collaborate as well as achieve our individual goals.

Our ideas and planned activities have had to be modified to help us collaborate in the best way possible. For one thing our ICT groups have remained the same as the groups we work in Modern Languages with, this means that the groups are much smaller. Because the group is smaller I feel it will be far easier to collaborate and share ideas.

I am in a group with Lyndsay and we have chosen healthy living as a topic. Curriculum for excellece covers all three aspects of the HWB; social/emotional, physical and mental health in their experiences and outcomes.

I very rarely work with Lyndsay and I am looking forward to collaborating with her. I feel we both have the same work ethic and ideas, I think this groups will work very sucessfully.

During the elective, we realised that we were in fact supposed to use the animation task to work on our collaboration. We were supposed to move around the room working on different stages of animation for different groups. I think that this would be a very good lesson to do with children in class because it would provide challenge for the children. However, we had a very limited time and needed our animation to link to the topic from our wiki. So, Even though the idea would be very useful for class, I feel that we worked as one group and this system worked best fro us. We now have an animation that links with the topic and can be used.

Here is our fitness video for our healthy living topic:

What Do I already know?

After looking at other people in the groups blogs, I realised that I had explained the introductory lecture but not my current skills and the skills we had began developing.

As I have discussed in my last post, I feel quite confident about creating wikispaces because I have previous experience and have explored how to use them. There are still aspects i can develop for example adding links and videos into a wikispace and how to create different graphics etc. I feel that my last wiki was fairly simple especially in it's design. This is my wiki from last year. Hopefully throughout this elective i while develop my skills and you will be able to see a progression from last years wiki and this years wiki.

Throughout this elective already I feel I am progressing. I have began blogging and can now add video clips and links to my wiki and blog.

I look forward to progressing more in ICT and exploring animation in more depth.

Introduction to ICT Elective

This week, I began the ICT elective and we began by discussing what we would be learning and the main aspects of the course. It appears to me that the elective is very focused on international relationships and connecting with the rest of the world. I am really looking forward to discovering what opportunities there are for children to connect with different people and different cultures.

My own experience at school was having a french pen pal, however, the process of writing letters and sending them by post was very slow. Technology will help make the process far quicker and also the children will be able to send all sorts of things e.g video clips and link to websites.

Throughout the elective we will be exploring animation, movie making, blogging and using wikispaces. My group have began our wikispace and are beginning to look at a topic to use. Last year, I created a wikispace for my french module and really enjoyed it. It has made me far more enthusiastic about using wikispaces and other technology in general. I feel that wikispaces are a useful resource to use with children to help them all communicate but also for the teacher and parents to communicate. It could be used to inform the parents of homework, events and what has been happening in the classroom. I am however, only beginning to explore this and other aspects of ICT and feel I have far more to learn.

My wiki: TamnDunn

When I was first told about creating a blog I was anxious because I was having to combine theory and my own reflections as well as learning a new piece of technology, however, after creating my blog and beginning to explore it, I am beginning to see the benefits; it allows you to reflect as well as communicate and share things with others.