ZIMMERTWINS.COM
zimmertwins.com
Printscreen of making a movie.
This class focussed on using the website 'zimmertwins.com' to create your own mini animation. The application allows you to produce animations (without voices) so that children can make use of other skills such as reading and writing. The program gives you a choice of characters and different animations such as running, walking etc. Within a classroom environment students can use this site to create a mini animation sequence to reflect perhaps a journal entry for the week, a response to a text or even just to promote the use of writing and reading in children that may not feel confident doing so infront of the class or in small literacy circles.
Making animations - DFILM.COM
During this lesson we also took a look at the webpage dfilm.com. This webpage is not aimed at primary school children as its themes are innapropriate for their age and educational value. The site is dedicated at adults having a little fun and expressing themselves through humourous adult themed films. The films can be created with a number of characters for which you write in a dialogue for, music and even a film title and credits. View the one I created during this weeks tutorial below:
Printscreen of making a movie.
dvolver.com
XTRANORMAL.COM
Xtranormal.com is another webpage that allows students to get creative and make an animated film. Xtranormal aim at promoting the use of movie making so that people can express their ideas in a more exciting and technological way. This site is excellent and in my opinion, is more appealing that those mentioned above. This is why:
Xtranormal gives students the option of a number of themes that the movie can be set in, for example the world cup.
Students are given the choice of 1 or 2 virtual actors to be in their movie.
Xtranormal is so advanced that the characters in the students film lip-sync the words that the students type as the script.
http://www.xtranormal.com/makemovies/
With this sort of technology available teachers should be promoting its use within the classroom. Take for example, oral presentations! Students would be much more motivated and engaged to give an oral presentation using this technology than simply typing up a few cue cards or making an un-original powerpoint presentation. Granted, the children watching would enjoy the presentation much more too.
Build Your Wild Self !
This website is alot of fun! The site provides a space for children to build their wild selves. In saying this, children are provided with the gadgets to select and design themselves as a wild animal. The children can select from a huge variety of things including their body gender, body shape, hair style and colour, eye and eyebrow shape and colour, mouth and clothes. Once the basic selections have been made the children have the opportunity to express themselves in a different way. The students must select a form of head gear (for example antlers or big ears), the nose from some sort of animal, the arms of an animal such as a gorilla, a tail and finally they must finish off their design with a background and of course, their name.
storygames.com
This website is alot of fun! The site provides a space for children to build their wild selves. In saying this, children are provided with the gadgets to select and design themselves as a wild animal. The children can select from a huge variety of things including their body gender, body shape, hair style and colour, eye and eyebrow shape and colour, mouth and clothes. Once the basic selections have been made the children have the opportunity to express themselves in a different way. The students must select a form of head gear (for example antlers or big ears), the nose from some sort of animal, the arms of an animal such as a gorilla, a tail and finally they must finish off their design with a background and of course, their name.
http://www.buildyourwildself.com/
This webpage is a good one to access at the beginning of the school year when the classroom is bare and the children are still introducing themselves to one another. It allow the children to express their wild self, its a fun way to decorate the room with bright colours and an excellent way of breaking the ice between students who may not know eachother yet.
SKETCH SWAP.COM
Sketchswap.com is yet another site that we visited in our tutorial this week. This site is a drawing/sketching site where students can draw a sketch and press the swap button on the screen. Selecting this button swaps the students drawing with a drawing that has been completed by another student elsewhere in the world. It is a great way to promote the use of the computer's mouse in younger children as it is a fun activity that has the children using the tool without realsing that they are actually building the skill.
http://www.sketchswap.com/
One issue with the use of this website is the inability to determine what image will be sent back to your students. In some instances, pictures that are sent back may be of a nature that is innapropriate for the students and in this case it is almost inevitable that by the time the teacher has determined that the picture is innapropriate, it has already appeared before the student on the screen.
STORY GAMES
Storygames.com is a great site to get ESL students onto. It promotes the use of literacy in a fun way for students to explore.
storygames.com
The site is full of literacy games for students. The above rebus story is a great way to start children to think about the different number of words that can be used in any context. For example, in the first sentence in the picture above 'Hermie the ______ went to _______ for a new ________'. This sentence included the picture of a crab, a set of eyes and a house. However, that is my explanation. Children may use any word to fill the sentence such as shelfish, look, see, glance and home. Tasks such as the one above allow teachers to look into the processing skills of their students. They help with sentence formation, comprehension and language formation and should be used as well as books to increase childrens literacy abilities.
This website could be incorporate into every classroom however, I would use this website as an add-on activity once my students have had the chance to build a solid structure with the leggo blocks first. This way they can compare and contrast the different aspects of space and area in a 3d and computer simulated example.
REASONABLY CLEVER . COM
Having access to the site reasonablyclever.com gives children the opportunity to build leggo structures using their ICT skills. This program is excellent for kids to begin thinking outside the square. It is one thing to build tangiable leggo structures but another thing to do so by observing computer generated images on your pc. On the site children can design their own leggo characters which is a fun thing for them to do.
This website could be incorporate into every classroom however, I would use this website as an add-on activity once my students have had the chance to build a solid structure with the leggo blocks first. This way they can compare and contrast the different aspects of space and area in a 3d and computer simulated example. 