Category: creativity

Friday was a busy day, starting off in London with an animation course run by Oscar Stringer at Institute of Education.

Working in two groups, we spent the day developing our animation skills, producing two short animations from initial idea to finished film complete with transitions, titles, sound and music. We used ICanAnimate to capture the animation then exported the film to iMovie to ‘finish’ it. My group used my Macbook and a Hue webcam – and it was lovely to meet the man behind Hue in the UK during the day as well (mine’s on order from Amazon – went for the blue one in the end!) whilst the other group used an iMac and a driverless webcam.

James, Carolyn and I took our inspiration from the Mr Men. Firstly, our models followed the principles of Mr Men (which are also important principles for plasticine animation – big features, bold shapes and simple designs) and secondly, we made an animation with a message – suitable for PSHE and based on friendship in the playground – a lonely girl on a bench wanting to join in with a game of ball.

The day reinforced all that I already knew about animating – the importance of keeping things simple, of planning well before you start, of working in collaboration and of how much fun it is!
We laughed so much making the animations – my group’s is posted below. This is the English version. We recorded three different ending – with the bench saying THE END in English, French and Spanish – so that we can use it in our classrooms and dub it in different languages.

If you want to find out more about animating, I can’t recommend Oscar’s courses enough. He has a real gift for making it all seem very simple (and it is) and conveys the great potential that animation has as a tool for creativity, collaboration, innovation and progression. Check out his website and his blog to find out more.

Amazing what you can do with a carpet tile, some plasticine and an idea!

Here’s my presentation from my Saturday session at the Primary Languages Show in Liverpool entitled You and Youtube.

The idea of the session was to give people ideas about how Youtube can be used in Primary Language Learning (PLL). We looked at alternatives to Youtube, how to use video clips if a site is blocked by downloading via one of a number of tools and of course, ideas of suitable clips to use and how they might be used to meet bjectives in the KS2 Framework.

As the movies included in my Keynote presentation were embedded, I have had to go back through the presentation and hyperlink to source sites. So if the title is not hyperlinked, click on the picture or black squarea nd you’ll be taken to the original!

Here are a couple of clips I showed that weren’t in the presentation.

spanish food song from janet wisner on Vimeo.

Activity ideas for use with the clips included:

• dressing up in clothes/ finding the flashcard as a race during Juguemos en el bosque
• holding up words – bateau, ciseau, la rivière, l’eau, or jigsaw texts in Bateau Ciseau
• listen out for a phoneme in Bateau ciseau (‘eau’) or Shnuffel (ich)
• respond to a Slideshare using Voicethread
• rewrite a song eg La Vaca Lola
• discuss cultural events – Semana Santa, German first day of school
• look at everyday life in other countries
• sing a long
• watching peers and using clips for assessment eg El Carnaval de los animales
• motivation – eg Baby Mario Mysteries

If you have any comments / questions, please feel free to leave them below, or e-mail me!

I was very privileged to be invited to present this year at the Primary Languages Show in Liverpool, not once but twice!

I promised at my two sessions that I would post my notes and resources on my blog for people to download and use.

So here’s my first presentation. If you download it, the hyperlinks all work – or did when I tried them. However, if they don’t, remember that I have bookmarked all the sites to which I referred (and more) on Delicious tagged PLS09 – http://delicious.com/lisibo/pls09

The Powerpoints I used are also below –

I have blogged this unit previously here and you will find my worksheets, the SoW and more ideas here and a fuller description of how we animated our animals here.

A couple of things I mentioned but didn’t put in the presentation – the masks were downloaded from Sparklebox and the animation was done using FramebyFrame on my Macbook. You can also use SMAnimator (free to download on a PC) or ICanAnimate (for PC or Mac costs about £40)

If you’ve got any questions, feel free to leave a comment below!

Here are a couple of movies of ideas from the first running of the Creativity in eTwinning workshop this morning.

The first shows some of the ideas raised about creativity and what it feels like to be creative.

The second are the reflections of the Sunglasses group on what they consider to be the ideal conditions for creativity to happen.

A really interesting seminar with lots of discussion about creativity and innovation.

Key ideas included the need for freedom, for space and for the acceptance of diversity; the need to spark ideas in one another, to accept that there are no right and wrong ideas and that the best conditions for creativity can be different for each person. Here are a number of photos taken of the ideas sparked by the session. Perhaps you’d like to add your own comments.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com