Get Kids Animating

Animation tools seem to be getting better and simpler to use every day and this one by Anithings is a great example of that.

It's designed for young learners to enable them to create short animated narrative clips. There's a nice video tutorial here showing how easy it is to create a short animated clip.



You'll need to have Adobe Air installed and then it is just a very quick download and you are then ready to start animating.

There are some useful PDF guidelines on how to use it which you can download from the site too.
There's a catch though, Anithings is still in beta and once it is finished the final version will cost money. Shame they can't think of a more up-to-date business model! Best download it now and get using it, if you can live with the bugs.

You can find some nice examples here of what kids in UK have been doing with the software.

Related links:

• Teaching EFL ESL with Comic Strips
• Dfilm - Dvolver Adds Embed Code
• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Great Collection of Short Films
• Great Source of Animated Movies
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Teaching EFL ESL with Comic Strips

I've been aware of the Make Belief Comix website for some time now, but I'm amazed at how well over that period of time it has been developed to meet the neeeds of EFL ESL teachers and students.

The basic concept of the site is simple. It enables teachers and students to create colourful original comic strips using a range of characters, simply by using the point and click interface. The characters have a range of different emotions to choose from, you can add your own dialogue using the speech bubbles or you can leave them blank for students to add their own.


You can then either email your finished cartoon strips to people or print them up for use in class

The Teachers Resources section has a great collection of ideas for how you can use the site with students and there is a wonderful collection of possible story ideas to get students creating their own stories

Here you can see some ESOL students talking about how they have used the site.


This is a wonderful example of a technical solution that can enable teachers to produce materials for the low tech classroom. Some really simple but great ideas for providing students with motivating materials.

I hope you enjoy and use it with your students.

Related links:

• Dfilm - Dvolver Adds Embed Code
  
• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Great Collection of Short Films
  
• Great Source of Animated Movies
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Dfilm - Dvolver Adds Embed Code

I've been a long time fan of Dvolver from its early days as Dfilm Maker. It was one of the first site I wrote about (Make you own animated movies)when I started blogging back in 2007. It's a really great site that allows students and teachers to create animated Flash cartoon movies with their own dialogue in just a couple of minutes.


I was in the process of visiting it again this morning to create a joke movie and was delighted to discover that an embed code has been added for the movies you create. This is great news as it makes it much easier to share the movies and include them in digital materials you or your students create.

Here's a quick joke movie I created



Great addition to a great tool. Hope you enjoy Dvolver and get your students making movies.

Here you can find some Cartoon Activities for students

Related links:

• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Great Collection of Short Films
  
• Great Source of Animated Movies
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Great Collection of Short Films

I was first attracted to The Hyde Tube because of it's fantastically simple interface, but once I started looking at the content I was really knocked out by its huge collection or really great short movies.

They have been divided into 3 simple categories.

• Animation
• 3D and mix media
• Live action

When you click on one of the thumbnail images, the video opens in the top left of screen. I was also pretty impressed by how fast everything loaded. My first impression, from the name (including 'Tube') was that this was yet another YouTube ap, but it looks like the films are unique content.

This kind of short visually powerful material is great for language classes and a great way to stimulate discussion and descriptive language use. Even something as simple as getting students to watch and develop a narrative for a clip can work well.


If you click on the share link above a video it will also provide you with a unique URL for that video so you can direct students to the ones you want them to watch.

Great stuff, free, all really simple and great to see that YouTube doesn't have ALL the best content.

• Here are some of my Video activities for EFL ESL students

Hope you enjoy it.

Related links:

• Understanding Irony
• Great Source of Animated Movies
• Image and Video Search
• Getting Video Tasks Online
• Online Video: What does it have to offer teachers and learners?
• News Videos for EFL ESL Materials Design
• Exploiting a Video Viral
• Create a YouTube Carousel

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Great Source of Animated Movies

I've just been enjoying some great animated movies on the Aniboom.com site. The site is like a YouTube for aspiring animators. they can upload their videos and interact on the Aniboom communities. The site pushes the quality videos to the front page so it's quite easy to find the 'good stuff'.


These kinds of movies are great to use with students as they are short and engaging and a lot of the communicative message is covered by the visual aspect, so you can even exploit many of these videos with lower level language learners.

There's a section of the site called 'Produce' which has series of animated movies that have been created for the site, so you could use these to build up a series of lessons for your students.


I also really like the 'Create' section which has a couple of nice tools to get students creating their own short animated movies and gifs.

One is called 'Shapeshifter' and it's a free online software for creating 2D animation. There's a video tutorial here showing how it works: Shapeshifter tutorial



The other is called 'Micro-Smotion' and it allows students to create animations using their webcam. They can then post these to blogs, Facebook etc or email them to friends.

There are even some free basic lessons in animation on Animate 101

So lots to do on Aniboom and well worth a visit. As with any website, be sure to check anything you use with your students before letting them see it.

Hope you enjoy this site.

Related links:

• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Make you own animated movies
• Extending a Sentence
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Exploiting two computer-based RPGs
• Animating vocabulary
• Exploiting Image Sequences

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..

Open source video animation

Big Buck Bunny, may sound like a rather dodgy name for an online video, but it is in fact the latest product from a company called The Blender foundation.

What's special about Big Buck Bunny is that it is a Pixar quality 3D animated movie made completely with free software and all the files and assets from the movie have been made under creative commons license so that others can contribute and develop more movies using those assets.


Anyway have a look at the product. This version is from Youtube, but you can access their site and download high quality and find out more about the project here.

This is a really wonderful project and a great movie. Time to start looking at how it can be used for language development.

Hope you enjoy it.

Best

Nik Peachey Read More..