Tuesday 19th February 2019
Today’s lesson was exploring the world of animation and investigating when used properly, animation can benefit and promote learning within the classroom. We looked at the many different animation apps that are available today and how to use these apps. One of the apps we looked at was puppet pals, having previously used puppet pals within a school setting before I know how much children enjoy using this app and how inventive the children can be when using it. Puppet pals is very easy to use and best suited to children in early or first level, although the characters available to use are minimal, children can use their imagination and add characters or backgrounds from pictures they have taken themselves.
According to ‘Moving Image Education’, animation breathes life into something that wouldn’t normally move, they also believe there are five main types of animation:
- Cut-out – this is seen as the fastest and easiest
- Stop-motion – can be carried out using plasticine models
- Pixilation – when humans become the puppets
- Drawn – classic example of this is Disney animation
- Computer – this is mostly found in movies and video games and is also known as CGI
(Moving Image Education)
Jarvis, describes animation as, “…the stringing together a sequence of static images, generally so they don’t appear to move.” (Jarvis, 2015, p89). He also states, “Animation can have a big visual impact…,” (Jarvis, 2015, p90). Although, I have never had experience with creating an animation before today, I do agree with Jarvis about how impactful animation can be especially for children. Children love being able to bring their ideas to life and animation is great way of making that possible.
The animation part of the module has been split over two lessons to allow us to get comfortable with the software we are going to be using and to be able to collect the resources we need. We need to work in groups for this task and I have chosen to work with the same group as I did for the last task, we worked well together and really enjoyed our final product, hopefully we will get the same result this time. The task was to create an animation using iStopMotion, the animation had to do one of the following:
- recreate a historical event
- represent a geographical process e.g. glaciation, volcanic eruption
- recreate a real-life scenario e.g. going to the dentist, shopping
- explain a mathematical principle.
As a group we quickly got started and were very excited about what we were going to create, we decided to do our animation on a natural disaster in the form of a tsunami. Once we had decided what form our animation was going to take, we made up a storyboard, (see picture below). Then we made up a list of resources we needed, so we could bring it to the next class, between us all we managed to equally share the list of resources between and luckily we all have children and have plenty of little figures and resources lying around the house to use. However, the creative person that I am, I insisted in making some pieces from scratch as well. Not surprisingly, this grew arms and legs I spent a full night sticking lollipops, material, card and straws together, but I did enjoy myself (see pictures below). Furthermore, it made me realise the preparation and time that would be needed to carry out a lesson like this and maybe why some teachers shy away from lessons like this due to lack of time and resources. Since I have never used iStopMotion before, I decided to tinker about with the app as well as carry out some research by looking into tutorial links given to us in class, which I found very helpful and can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/Cw7_OeWpR6I.
To say I am looking forward to next week is an understatement, I cannot wait for all our ideas to come together and to have a finished product to showcase to everyone.
Deborah ♥
Referneces:
Animation Chefs. (2014) Animating Kids: iStopMotion Tutorial.[Online] Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw7_OeWpR6I&feature=youtu.be[Accessed: 19 February 2019].
Jarvis, M. (2015) Brilliant Ideas for using ICT in the Classroom.Oxon: Routledge.
Moving Image Education website: [Online] Available: https://movingimageeducation.org/create-films/animation[Accessed: 19 February 2019]
