Go Animate and Peer Assessment

I had an impromptu lesson in our ICT suite a couple of weeks ago with my Year 7 class so decided to give Go Animate a go. I'd wanted to use if many times over the last few years but never quite had the opportunity - I think it may even have been blocked for a while - so was keen to get going.
I was very specific about what I expected at the end of the lesson, to avoid too much "playing" and not enough French.
At the end of the lesson they emailed their links to me - my school email addres, of course - and I was please to see what I received.
Once received, I put each one onto my Langwitch blog and then asked the class to go back to the blog and comment on one anothers' work using the "what went well" and "even better if" format. Some of the comments were really lovely, such as:

"c'est fantastique"

"that was great use of French, well done!"

"C'est fantashique! It was awesome, but the speach was very fast and you weren't able to catch all of it. Bien!:)"

"bien. I thought one thing you could of improved was to check the speech bubble cause one was english but I thought the rest was really good".

I find it interesting that they were more critical than I would have been, but find that, generally pupils are more critical of one anothers' work that I expect and often need to encourage them to find more positives!

I am now definitely a fan of Go Animate and have already used it again with my Year 8 class...they will appear shortly on the blog or wiki.

Animation is now available

Here is a link to where our famous animation can be found.
The title is "El fantasma, el blobbo y la palmera" and, with the music, it's really quite scarey (lol)

El fantasma, el blobbo y la palmera

Links to the other creations from the animation workshop at the IoW Conference can be found on Joe Dale's blog here.

I had great fun and look forward to being able to do some with pupils in the near future.

Get Animated! with Mark Pentleton

My final session of the day was a "hands on" workshop with Mark Pentleton of Radio Lingua fame learning how to do some stop motion animation. I have been longing to learn how to do this since watching Stuart Gorse's Gorseville animations that he creates so excellently with his pupils. Here was my opportunity to gain some small insight into how I might use animation with some of my classes.
The workshop was fascinating, if not only because I got to work with the talented José Picardo and Sam Downe (who both seemed to know a great deal more about this kind of thing than I did). We used a programme that can be downloaded free of charge from the internet called Stop Motion Animator from Clay Animator. It was really simple to use. We just made out characters and grabbed the shots. Apparently 12 shots per second(?). Our film had to last 30 seconds, so lots of shots needed (although I think we cheated a bit!).
As Halloween was approaching, we decided to create a film with a ghostly theme: "El fantasmo, el blobbo y la palmera". It was a spooky number that included a ghost who was lost and blob who knew the way and a palm tree. To create our characters we used plasticine (it's more rigid, apparently!!!). We took the shots and then moved them into Windows Moviemaker to add sound and loops (look at me being all technical!). Since we only had 10 seconds of film we decided to add some spooky music and lengthy credits. I have to admit that the music bit was a bit lost on me as is involved transfering everything to José's MacBook doing some magic, hocus, pocussy things and then transfering it back!!!! Anyway it looked and sounded great at the end!
How do I plan to use animation with my pupils?
I think that this kind of thing (for me, anyway) is best done as an enrichment activity in a club or as a day's activity. I can see how I could maybe do this with G&T linguists for a day long project..planning the script, making the storyboard, creating the characters, learning how to use the software and then finally getting to grips with creating their animation. I think, that after lots of practise I might be able to think about doing this kind of thing in a class setting but again, it's all about starting small and gaining confindence.