We had pupils from Heritage Park and Sevenhills Schools in for a number of sessions last half term creating some animations.
Heritage Park students animated the story of Perseus and Medusa – first reducing the tale to a manageable number of scenes and creating some fantastic figures out of plasticine. Once they had animated the story in I Can Animate, they edited in Windows Movie Maker, adding a voiceover and titles to help understanding. You can see their finished film below:
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The group of year 11 students from Sevenhills had an equally difficult task as they had to come up with their own stories to animate. All of them were influenced by films, TV programmes and computer games for their topics, and found that creating the characters and developing a story was the hardest part of the process. You can see a couple of examples of their films below:
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
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Runners Up
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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.
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!”
Year 5 pupils from Sharrow School came to the CLC to recreate life in Victorian Britain. They came with costumes and props and acted out scenes inspired by the book Street Child by Berlie Doherty in the form of news reports. These were filmed in front of the green screen, so that they could use photos of the era as backgrounds. They included stealing from the pie shop, escape from the workhouse and a family being evicted from their house. Following filming, they edited the clips in Windows Movie Maker to create their finished film.
The result looks fantastic, and the pupils all enjoyed the experience. Here is a short audio clip from their teacher:
There are a number of mini digital camcorders currently available, some for under £100, that would be ideal for use in the classroom. These include the Flip Video range and the Creative Vado. They have primarily been designed for capturing videos to upload to YouTube and similar sites, but would be particularly suited to primary pupils.
The CLC has purchased a Flip Mino for £108 to trial, to see if we can recommend it to our partnership schools. It is 5cm wide, 10cm long and approximately 1½cm deep, so it looks more like an mp3 player or phone, and fits perfectly in a pocket. It has a small LCD screen for playback and as viewfinder, and a 2x digital zoom. It is incredibly easy to get started – you press the power button and then the big red button on the front to start recording. A second press stops recording. There is enough memory to store 60 minutes of recording, but no way of extending that. To download the video there is an inbuilt USB connector, which slots in very neatly to the top of the device, though due to it’s rigidity it can be awkward to use in tight spaces and I wonder how long it will last with constant use.
When you plug the device in, it opens the built-in video program, where you can trim clips, and add music and titles. The good thing about this is that it doesn’t require a firewire (or firewire port on your PC), or any complex video editing software to create simple clips. The only downside is that you can’t choose where to save the video, and it defaults to a Flip Video folder in My Documents on the specific machine. Most of the time this isn’t a problem, except when staff (and children) have no access to the hard drive, only to the network in a school. You can however get round this by using the video from the device directly – as if you were copying it from a USB device, and then editing it in Windows Movie Maker or another video editing piece of software.
In terms of the quality of the video, I was pleasantly surprised. It is far better than the Digital Blue output, and copes well with different lighting. It can’t compete with a standard digital video recorder, but for short clips in class or on field trips, it is perfectly adequate. Here is a short section of sample video to give you an idea of quality.
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So all in all, I’m impressed with the Flip Mino, and although it won’t replace the normal DV cameras we use in the centre, we would recommend them to our partnership.
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.
Year 11 students from Meadowhead School have been working at the CLC to improve their appreciation of a text they are studying in drama. Small groups were filmed acting out a scene from Mark Wheeller’s play “Too Much Punch for Judy”, and then they edited the footage to look at different camera angles and add effects where appropriate.
Teacher Elaine Pollard said, “[it] was a rewarding and worthwhile experience for staff and students alike and really helped the group improve upon their self-confidence to perform in front of each other. I hope that projects like this become an integral part of our work in Drama and plans have already been made to repeat this kind of work with a Year 10 group.”
Posted by ssclc 
Posted by ssclc 
Posted by ssclc 
Year 5 pupils from Sharrow School came to the CLC to recreate life in Victorian Britain. They came with costumes and props and acted out scenes inspired by the book Street Child by Berlie Doherty in the form of news reports. These were filmed in front of the green screen, so that they could use photos of the era as backgrounds. They included stealing from the pie shop, escape from the workhouse and a family being evicted from their house. Following filming, they edited the clips in Windows Movie Maker to create their finished film.
under £100, that would be ideal for use in the classroom. These include the 
Year 11 students from Meadowhead School have been working at the CLC to improve their appreciation of a text they are studying in drama. Small groups were filmed acting out a scene from Mark Wheeller’s play “Too Much Punch for Judy”, and then they edited the footage to look at different camera angles and add effects where appropriate.