Thing #10

Discovering Animation Tools

 I explored and created an animated cartoon on Voki that I will use to welcome my physicist to Newton's 3 laws of motion. It was pretty easy and you have options for changing the clothes, accessories, colors, backgrounds, voice languages and accents, and even genders. I think it is a good idea to change up your lessons so that the kids aren't always listening to me talk. You are also able to create a presentation and have your character speak the entire time. You can even use your own voice and record yourself while using the character. I think this is good idea to use for absent students, as well as for the students to review the days lesson. It can be posted on edmodo for accessibility. This would benefit our ELL's big time because they are listening, speaking, hearing, and writing. A goal of mine is to develop digital lessons for all my topics and next year to flip my entire classroom. I am using a hybrid model this year, and so far that it has been good. I wish there were a few more options for characters, and it would be cool if you could actually create your own character.  Below is the link for the quick voki I made.
Newton's Laws Welcome

I also played around with PowToon some and am excited about having the students create videos using this tool for Newton's Laws of Motion. I am currently creating one to post my expectations for their videos. I also like that that are several preloaded templates, and all you have to do is edit them to fit your needs instead of having to create them from scratch, although that option is there as well. Since we previously researched collaboration and real time sharing/editing across multiple users, it would be nice if PowToons expanded their options and added group editing. I could assign my students a group assignment in class on the iPads, and they could collaborate and work together to crete their final product. Due to me being a perfectionist and all the individual text boxes, images, animations you have to add individually, this is taking a lot longer than I wish it did. I even went the template route. Maybe in a future update they could make it a little more user friendly.