The University of Manchester is running a Computer Animation Competition for UK school Children using Alice, a free downloadable computer animation system. http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/Digital60 The competition closes on 1 May but I would recommend looking at the programme anyway. I've used Storytelling Alice and love it. I could see it being used not just for ICT but also in literacy - it certainly got my class of year 5's involved in storytelling - they did not want to go out for break on the first sunny day of the year!! It sparked loads of discussion about plot, dialogue, characterisation, etc you can even go into camera angles and lighting. I'm also thinking about using it for an introduction to control.
Dr John mentioned Buzz Webz. I'm currently involved in the trial. It's great in that it's easy to publish the children's work and allows them to collaborate on projects but I have to say that feed back from my pupil's is that it's a bit limited - they feel they have more options in Textease. It depends what your objectives are. It would be at it's best I think if you wanted an easy way for children to collaborate and publish work. I personally don't think it would stretch pupils aiming to develop ICT skills. I'm more excited to get going on the VLE - if it's as good as it looks it could revolutionise the way we work.
Pete - not just your class I was so tired watching the early morning news yesterday that it did not occur strange that penguins could fly!! and I'm currently..... (abducted by aliens?)
2 comments:
Fab, thanks Nettie. i've heard of Alice before, but not used it. I'll have a look, and add it to our delicious account...
Great fun, I might show it to the kids at school. They enjoy being introduced to new programs at school which they can then use at home for free.
Sharing the animations after can be a bit tricky. The save as webpage option requires the viewer to have installed a number of Java plugins. The save as a movie currently doesn't work at all. I've used some free screen recorder software (Camstudio) to capture a swf file as the animation plays.
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