die little cartoon man

I might be temporarily hooked on go animate.

I’m really looking forward to getting the students to make their own.

With the SNAB course they provide these awful ugly introduction to topic videos. They aren’t really engaging or, if I’m brutal, interesting. When I started teaching this I used it, but never again. But it’s a shame in a way, it’s nice to introduce the new topics, so I had a go with go animate this afternoon. It doubled up as my pbwiki summer school homework as well.

I’ve added it to the new wiki I’m trying to get ready for the new term. Now I’ve more of an idea of how to use them I’m hoping it’ll be more successful than the version 1.0 one I had last year. I love the idea of such a great collaborative resource so I’m pleased that I’ve had the chance to play with it this summer.

I’m hoping to set up some long term individual projects on the wiki for each student, no matter what course they’re on. For the vocational students it’ll contribute to their assignments wonderfully, especially the year two national students. For the AS/A2 it’ll be a great revision source for them I hope!

[edit August 6th] You can follow this link to see the video (thanks Sue).

Edublog hate go animate

animoto

I’m not sure if I like it. I can see the benefits, it’s pretty easy and quick, the students will get a grip on it and can do it pretty much from any computer, but the I don’t like the effects much. Maybe I’m just being snobby.

I’ll use it with the BTEC Firsts in the planning stages of their history of medicine animation. I’ll give it a go!

the perils of not doing your homework

This was a lot of fun to make and very easy. Yay Go Animate!

now move the arm a tiny bit, now a tiny bit more, now dismember the frankenstein…

I liked the stop motion animation thing and my very first instinct was to dismiss it because it looks time consuming. Playing with the cut outs did take a while but the results were very cute. iStopMotion is very easy to use, really user friendly and fairly self explanatory. I thought maybe I could set animated dissection tasks for students who were too squeamish to chop up the real things in the lab. The poor sensitive types are at a disadvantage in anatomy because the virtual dissection we have to contend with is pretty lame. I liked that idea and hadn’t really thought past it.

Next year my teaching schedule changes quite a bit, I gain a lot of hours in some areas, and lose a lot in others. One of the groups I lose hours with is the BTEC first students. I will see them for just over two hours a week and teach one unit with them – Science In Medicine. This was causing me some issues because a lot of what they do in this unit follows on from the cell, tissue and organ physiology they start with in the other biology units. How could I teach application of anatomy when they hadn’t learned the anatomy yet?

Then I remembered that a set of criteria focuses on the developmental stages of a medicine, from hypothesis to synthesis to testing, clinical trials, marketing and development. This year we used a case study of the development of Viagra as an example of how a drug is developed. Next year, right at the start of the year, I think we’re going to make an/some animation/s and have a screening event. I can afford to give them a good few weeks to achieve this and as a way of introducing them to their new course I think it will be lovely. It’ll get them focused as a team of students (peer support in vocational courses is brilliant) very quickly, it’ll force them to work on their planning and literacy and will give me the chance to get through a lot of key and study skills with them at the same time as them getting through an assignment. I’m quite excited really!