For the last two weeks in Digital Technologies we have been focusing and producing animations and movies using the apps iMovie and iStopMotion. The videos were to relate well to our previous input of internet safety and tie in with literacy outcomes in the curriculum for excellence. We worked in groups to come up with a short clip about one or two minutes long to show the impact of online safety and get this message across to the children using these clips. Alongside my partner, we chose to create our video based on the dangers of the world wide site, Facebook. We decided to create a fake profile for a young girl around the same age as what the children in a primary school would be. We ensured the profile showed her date of birth, home address, friends, family and of course, her interests such as sailing and ‘finding treasure’. These are all personal information that should never be posted on social media for everyone to see however, this is the way we were going to get across the message of internet safety to our learners. If you are wondering why her favourite hobbies is sailing and finding treasure, that is a good question. By using the app iMovie we used the pirate setting and related the young girls name- ‘Jacalyn Sparrow’ and various other personal information to the theme of pirates. By showing this to young children we felt we would be able to draw their attention to the pirate theme and make it more exciting for them to watch as well as having the important message behind it. Our main message that we created was that social media is a map that leads to peoples lives, just like a map that leads to treasure.We found this extremely beneficial in link with our theme as well as the dangers of posting personal information online.

After having spent one input on this we were ready to publish our short clips to the rest of the class today. My lecturer set the scene as an oscar/premier of movies where we all gathered round the interactive board watching each of the groups videos, I found this extremely interesting and useful to gain ideas from my peers. My class consists of 20 adults as well as my lecturer and can I just say I have never seen so many adults excited over watching movies and eating popcorn ever, we were so captivated! This gave me the realisation that if adults were so excited over this, can you imagine what 20 children would be like! Learning should always be fun, engaging and motivating and I feel this was a perfect lesson example I could have with my learners in the future. Digital Technology embraces children’s minds and helps children become more creative and more willing to be challenged, stepping away from old traditional lessons that is now out of date.

From this input I have learned that animations can be used successfully as part of a literacy lesson. Planning before hand children could use picture story boards to explain a story in their own way following on to making a movie out of it. This is leading on from the old fashion ways of writing down a creative story in your jotter and handing it into the teacher to mark. Learners are increasingly becoming bored of this and are being dampened down as they can’t express their true literacy skills as they find writing too hard. This can also be backed up by a quote made by Younie, S., Leask, M. and Burden, K (eds.) (2014) in ‘Teaching and Learning with ICT in the Primary School’pg 14. “Story telling can engage reluctant learners and those who might find story telling using their own drawings or hand writing challenging.”  I personally agree with this as well as the findings of the Scottish Government Jounral, Literature review on the Impact of Digital Technology on Learning and Teaching, that states that digital technology is becoming more successful in the learning and teaching of literacy and numeracy lessons. This shows that literacy can be expressed through animation and learners who don’t necessarily enjoy the writing and copying from a text book can thrive off the making of a film, learn and provide good quality work this way.