• The Project
• Evaluation
• Recommendations
• Examples

The Project

This project was designed to extend the use of ICT for teachers and children alike. It is hoped that using animation will enable children to express themselves in a new media. Animation can be used to support various aspects of the curriculum e.g. re-enforcing the action of cams and levers in DT, story telling and play scripts in literacy, translation and rotation in numeracy.

The project ran over a five week period, and roughly followed the same model in all the schools involved. Each class had approximately one hour of ICT input per week and some schools were also able to give an equivalent amount of time, working with the class teacher to plan an extended animation. The software used was Complete Animator by Iota Software and children worked in twos and threes to produce their animations.

The first two weeks focused on becoming familiar with the software, although there was inevitably some revision and additional skills introduced during the later sessions. During the second part of the project the children spent three weeks worked to produce an extended animation to support their learning. Choice of subject was left to the class teachers. With no previous experience it seemed sensible to try to cover as a wide a range of topics as possible to assess the impact of using animation in those subjects.

Evaluation

The introductory sessions worked well. All the children were able to create an animation with little or no adult support. The quality of the outcome varied but all the children expressed pleasure at their own success. In one school a new pupil with little spoken English was able to communicate with her partner to produce a successful animation of a growing plant. The pupil’s partner was anxious that we appreciated and celebrated the amount of input from the new pupil.

By the end of the project all the groups involved produced animations relating to the chosen topic. The most successful activities involved the children re-counting one element of a story . This was because the subject matter was finite and known to the children, because the class teachers had led the children in story boarding activities away from the computers. At the end of the project several children remarked that they understood the story better as a result of their animation work.

Recommendations

1. Grouping of children should relate to subject knowledge rather than IT skills.
2. Children’s basic IT skills should be equal to the work - particularly saving and retrieving work.
3. The subject for animation should follow a recognisable structure e.g. a fable, a volcanic eruption, a specific historic event.
4. The second part of the project also requires classroom based input, to ensure that the children have an appropriate knowledge of the subject  for the animation.

Examples

The animations below are saved as .avi files and should open in your default media player.  If you need to download a media player go to windowsmediaplayer.

 

Park Road Primary, Timperley Year 4  -  Bridges    Alex and Reece    Faye and Sophie    Hannah and Samantha    Jessica and Eleanor   St Matthew's CE Primary School Year 4/5 - The Lion and the Mouse    Rachael and Kallum    Gabe and Miss Brown    Matthew    Owain

Springfield Primary Year 5  -  Romans    5D Chariot Wars    5HD Roman Killer    Kara and Rosie    Roman Race Park Road Primary, Timperley Year 5 - Theseus and the Minotaur   Abi and Dan   Abigail and Elizabeth   Eve and Ben   Matt and Harriet   Theseus and the Minotaur - Year 5