By the way, have you come across this site http://www.teachertube.com/ yet? It's a retty cool alternative to YouTube and obviously has a lot less issues about language, profanity (some YouTube comments are amazingly profance) and questionable images. Not only good for students but also for teachers as well as it has some good motivational videos and other material that illustrate how ICT in everyday life and in education are changing (almost in front of our eyes). Plus its gots lots of small student created materials that can really help orient and inspire a class of students.
And yay! it's not blocked by default by DECS - so it must be clean and wholesome and teachers can go to it straight away.
I've also been using a nice little freeware program called Pivot Stickfigure Animator. It's a small 485 kb download and it comes with some sample files and you can save your work as animated gif's. It lets you create stick figure animations. It works well with students and provides a very simple way of giving them the chance to do a 'free time' (if you like) fill in lesson where they use the computer to CREATE something. But even a simple free time filler can be scaffolded into quite productive projects if you have a mind to do it. You can save the little files it creates as animated image files (animated gif's) and these files (there's only one file for a whole movie) will keep on replaying over and over. Then you can take these images and use them in Word documents, in PowerPoints and even embed them into excel spreadsheets. You could use Excel to create a timeline and have images for each stage or for key events in a narrative- a good way to use Excel with it's ability to pivot text, colour cells to represent sections and so on).
Anyway I've taken students individual animated gif's and stitched them together into a PowerPoint presentation. I did this during a lesson as they were creating their animations. You can simply save what they have and it will be animated provided there are more than 2 frames.
I added some colour effects, the names of the student authors and this certainly impressed the year 2/3 middle primary class. We could use the PowerPoint to go and create a movie and storyboard what we want to cover in future lessons. A teacher could also insert these animated gif's into Photostory, Movie Maker and add narration and descriptive captions and build up quite powerful texts combining sounds / narration, images, text - and all without photographs! The default background is white but you can add a single background image if you like and this gives us lots of options (scanned pictures of student art, photographs, images created in kidpix and so on) to go on with.
And yay! it's not blocked by default by DECS - so it must be clean and wholesome and teachers can go to it straight away.
I've also been using a nice little freeware program called Pivot Stickfigure Animator. It's a small 485 kb download and it comes with some sample files and you can save your work as animated gif's. It lets you create stick figure animations. It works well with students and provides a very simple way of giving them the chance to do a 'free time' (if you like) fill in lesson where they use the computer to CREATE something. But even a simple free time filler can be scaffolded into quite productive projects if you have a mind to do it. You can save the little files it creates as animated image files (animated gif's) and these files (there's only one file for a whole movie) will keep on replaying over and over. Then you can take these images and use them in Word documents, in PowerPoints and even embed them into excel spreadsheets. You could use Excel to create a timeline and have images for each stage or for key events in a narrative- a good way to use Excel with it's ability to pivot text, colour cells to represent sections and so on).
Anyway I've taken students individual animated gif's and stitched them together into a PowerPoint presentation. I did this during a lesson as they were creating their animations. You can simply save what they have and it will be animated provided there are more than 2 frames.
I added some colour effects, the names of the student authors and this certainly impressed the year 2/3 middle primary class. We could use the PowerPoint to go and create a movie and storyboard what we want to cover in future lessons. A teacher could also insert these animated gif's into Photostory, Movie Maker and add narration and descriptive captions and build up quite powerful texts combining sounds / narration, images, text - and all without photographs! The default background is white but you can add a single background image if you like and this gives us lots of options (scanned pictures of student art, photographs, images created in kidpix and so on) to go on with.
