Stop Motion Animation

As part of my preparation for working with the Digikidz this week I have been watching videos!  I really liked this video sourced from http://mashable.com/2010/05/29/stop-motion-videos/

I have found a collection of short animations by 9 year olds to share with the Digikidz as exemplars.  The plan is to view and then discuss the children's likes and dislikes about the animations so they can start think about what they might like to do with their own project.  I am then going to introduce them to the idea that they are going to include symbols in their animations with the purpose being to share these with English second language learners so they can understand the story without the audio.  We can then come up with a setting for each story.  After this we will work together to create storyboards, collect props and create the scenery.

Fotobabble re Jacqui Sharp

Instantly ideas spring to mind for literacy for this site Fotobabble. Another great link from the Web 2.0 in Education blog which would be very useful for many things in the classroom. It is somewhere in between voicethread and vocaroo as it allows you to upload a photo but not more than one. So it appears to me that it would be useful for children to use a self-reflection tool that could be embedded into their ePortfolio. There could be a photo of their work or of them creating their piece of work combined with their thoughts - challenges, triumphs, next steps. Whereas with voicethread the teacher would also be able to comment this would not be possible with fotobabbly, however, the comments could be added via post comments in a blog etc.

I think the part that would be appealing to many of my colleagues is the ease with which the embed code can be obtained and then the fotobabble can be transferred into a class blog/ePortfolio etc which is sometimes the tricky part for people to manage.

eLearning Support in Classes

I Have been very busy for the past 2 days supporting teachers and children in their classrooms.  I am encouraging the teachers to plan independent work for their classes so they are available to work together with me and co-teach to develop their own skills and confidence using Kid Pix, Voicethread and the easi-speak microphone which are our focuses for this Term.  It has worked well in most rooms especially where the class Digikidz could be used to support.

Here is a voicethread created by room 4:

It is very similar to the voicethread rooms 11 and 4 made last week during book week with support from myself and Mrs P:

It is interesting how many teachers say repeatedly that they struggle to complete projects that have been started.  I suggest choosing a group, not the whole class, planning the project in parts e.g drawing the picture in Kid Pix the first day, scripting the story and recording it the next day.  Not introducing anything else for that group until the project is completed.  Although sometimes you do need to have a catch up morning to stay completely organised!

I have just wandered through the shared teaching area in Pod 1 and been so excited to see the teacher I worked with this morning continuing on using the skills she learned with other children in her class.  Then in Pod 2 I saw another colleague using Kid Pix in the same way as was demonstrated to her in her in-class support session yesterday.  It is just as rewarding seeing your colleagues achieve success as it is the children!  I am so proud of my team!

Kid Pix Problems

I have figured out, with a little help from my friend Belinda, how to address the problem I've been having with recording audio onto slides in Kid Pix. What you can do is to draw your picture then copy it several times calling it e.g leaf, leaf1, leaf2, leaf3 etc then record one sentence on each slide. Pay attention to the audio indicator as you are recording to keep track of how much time you have left before reaching the maximum size allowed per slide. Then import the slides one after the other without transitions and it will look like one slide but with longer audio. I am going to try this out with the Digikidz next week when I am working in classes. I still haven't solved my problem exporting slideshows to Quicktime but am hoping that if I send the file to Belinda and it works that will mean it's a SPS network error and Quicktime needs to be re-installed to fix the problem. I would really like to get some of the children's fabulous work onto the Digikidz blog and into my wikispace as evidence for my Action Research project.

Kid Pix Problems

I am having problems adding audio to Kid Pix slides. There seems to be a limit to how much you can say on each slide (approx 1 sentence). Can anyone help with where I'm going wrong?!