Over the holidays I came across the Learning Event Generator by John Davitt, which generates over 2500 permutations of topic and activity, for example: “Do the concept of gravity as a blow by blow sports commentary” or one of my favourites: “Do the history of the Olympics as a mime”.
I then decided to create my own slightly more colourful version aimed at Primary teachers, to randomise choice of ICT activities. You can see the Activity Generator here. Type in your own topic at the top, press the button and it randomly generates an ICT activity.
To make it even more useful to teachers, it is in the form of a template, whereby you can edit a text file with your own options, to create a bespoke list of activities. If this template would be useful to you, please e-mail me at cmoore@ssclc.net, and I’ll send it along.
Finally, if you teach at one of our partnership schools (see list here), you are welcome to come along to the CLC with your pupils to be used as guinea pigs for a randomly generated ICT activity session – with small groups working on the same topic, but all using a different medium.
A second Spanish Summer School ran last week, essentially a repeat of the first one with different children. Once again it was a great success, with feedback from parents that their children were really keen to come back each day as they were enjoying it so much.
Here are some of the comic strips and animations they created – the pronunciation is fantastic on the animations:
The CLC recently completed its inaugural Music Video Summer School, inspired by having a number of bands using our music recording facilities this year. Fourteen students spent 5 days at the centre creating a music video in 4 different groups. We asked one of the bands from our partnership schools, The Ruze (website here), to record one of their tracks for groups to create a video for. One of the groups chose to record their own song which gave them a chance to use the recording facilities. The following days were spent planning, filming, animating and editing the films, with students learning how to film using with the green screen and edit in Adobe Premiere.
You can hear feedback from one of the groups here
The finished videos were all excellent and were judged by a panel made up of CLC staff:
The Winner
done
Runners Up
done
done
done
Thanks to all the participants for their hard work, and particular thanks to The Ruze for the track and allowing the groups to film them playing.
Whilst everyone else is on holiday I thought I’d make a short film on how to make a basic stop-motion animation, for showing to students before we start any animating. It doesn’t go into what hardware you need, but talks about planning, making sets and characters, and the actual animation. There are many more tips and tricks that can be mentioned, but I wanted to keep it short – maybe before the end of the holidays I’ll have created a part 2.
done
Let me know if it’s any use, or if I’ve missed anything obvious.
We have been running a number of summer schools at the CLC over the summer holidays, including a three day Spanish summer school. We had fourteen year 5 and 6 students learning the basics in Spanish, whilst using lots of ICT. They started with greetings, asking how you are and what your name is. They then used Comic Life to create short conversations illustrated with pictures of their choice:
Everyone then recorded their conversations using mp3 recorders and uploaded both comic strips and audio to Glogster.
On the second day the students learnt the numbers, how to say where you live and some simple weather. They then wrote and performed weather forecasts for a particular Spanish-speaking country in front of the green screen, so they could have a picture of the country in the background. They edited these in Windows Movie Maker (once the backgrounds had been added in Adobe Premiere) and posted them onto their Glogs together with information they had found out about their country.
On day 3 they learnt the colours and pets, and in pairs created a short animation about animals – you can see all their efforts below.
In all it was a successful few days, and the use of ICT certainly seemed to be very effective in helping the participants learn their Spanish. Here is one parent’s feedback regarding her daughter’s experience:
“After her first day she came home and she had learnt more in one day than she had doing a year of Spanish at school! It has renewed her enthusiasm – combining technology/language and creativity has worked really well. Many thanks!”
The CLC was overrun with monkeys 2 weeks ago, as two year 4 classes from Sir Harold Jackson School arrived in order to animate the story Monkey Do, Monkey See. The classes read the story as part of a literacy project at school, then they made some beautiful sets and props to bring to the CLC. Once here they animated the story using Stop Motion Pro – not my favourite animation software, but the one we have for the PCs. Whilst one group was animating, the other group used Comic Life to create a comic strip version of the story, then they swapped at lunchtime. The groups will finish their animations at school, using Windows Movie Maker to add titles, credits, voiceovers and music.
The students worked really well together in their groups, and managed to create some fantastic animations, as you can see below. Their teacher said,
“The children thoroughly enjoyed themselves and were actively involved in both activities, which ran very smoothly.”
A Year 3 class from Norton Free Primary School wrote their own Mr. Men and Little Miss stories at school, then created hand drawn sets and characters to bring to the centre. At the CLC they worked in groups using I Can Animate and iMovie on Apple Macbooks to animate their stories in two dimensions. Animation is always a difficult skill for young children, as it involves good teamwork to agree how the story will progress, attention to detail and a lot of patience. The end result is always worth it though, as you can see by the example below:
Year 2 pupils from Mundella School spent the day at the CLC recreating the Great Fire of London. Small groups created stop-motion animations using I Can Animate (see animation above) with some fantastic hand-made sets whilst others sampled Baroque music and created their own sound effects in Garageband. Others dressed up as Samuel Pepys, King Charles and a number of other key people of the times, to act out scenes in front of the green screen, in order to add fire footage afterwards in Adobe Ultra. A final group interviewed characters and talked about artefacts from the fire.
As you can imagine it was pretty hectic, but the pupils and adults learnt a great deal about the events and how to use lots of different bits of technology.
Two year 5 classes from Bankwood Primary School came to the CLC last week to create stop motion animation films of the legend of Perseus and Medusa. They created some fantastic sets on cardboard, and made characters out of plasticine. Each group spent the morning animating a scene from the story using Stop Motion Pro – we felt that although it worked well enough, it wasn’t as easy to use as I Can Animate (but we bought it before I can Animate was released for the PC). The pupils learnt that it was very important not to knock the set or the camera, otherwise it looked like an earthquake had happened. The biggest problem was making sure there was enough animation to fit the dialogue to, especially in scenes with less action.
The afternoon was spent editing the film in Windows Movie Maker – adding music, titles and effects. I think you’ll agree that the final films look excellent, and the pupils and staff learnt a great deal about working together as a team, using the equipment, and the patience needed to create a masterpiece in plasticine.
The BBC Blast webpages have lots of information about writing scripts, film-making and directing, as well as an area to upload your own films (in addition to pages on music, dance, games, art, fashion and writing). They are also offering you a chance to have your film shown on BBC2 in December if you are between 13 and 19. You need to get a move on as the deadline is 17th October 2008.
If you are between 16 and 19 you can apply for a £3000 bursary to help you get started and work with industry professionals. This is an excellent opportunity for all budding film-makers, so please tell as many people as you can about it.
Over the holidays I came across the Learning Event Generator by John Davitt, which generates over 2500 permutations of topic and activity, for example: “Do the concept of gravity as a blow by blow sports commentary” or one of my favourites: “Do the history of the Olympics as a mime”.
Posted by ssclc 
Posted by ssclc 
Posted by ssclc 
