Get Kids Animating

Animation tools seem to be getting better and simpler to use every day and this one by Anithings is a great example of that.

It's designed for young learners to enable them to create short animated narrative clips. There's a nice video tutorial here showing how easy it is to create a short animated clip.



You'll need to have Adobe Air installed and then it is just a very quick download and you are then ready to start animating.

There are some useful PDF guidelines on how to use it which you can download from the site too.
There's a catch though, Anithings is still in beta and once it is finished the final version will cost money. Shame they can't think of a more up-to-date business model! Best download it now and get using it, if you can live with the bugs.

You can find some nice examples here of what kids in UK have been doing with the software.

Related links:

• Teaching EFL ESL with Comic Strips
• Dfilm - Dvolver Adds Embed Code
• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Great Collection of Short Films
• Great Source of Animated Movies
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials

Best

Nik Peachey

Teaching EFL ESL with Comic Strips

I've been aware of the Make Belief Comix website for some time now, but I'm amazed at how well over that period of time it has been developed to meet the neeeds of EFL ESL teachers and students.

The basic concept of the site is simple. It enables teachers and students to create colourful original comic strips using a range of characters, simply by using the point and click interface. The characters have a range of different emotions to choose from, you can add your own dialogue using the speech bubbles or you can leave them blank for students to add their own.


You can then either email your finished cartoon strips to people or print them up for use in class

The Teachers Resources section has a great collection of ideas for how you can use the site with students and there is a wonderful collection of possible story ideas to get students creating their own stories

Here you can see some ESOL students talking about how they have used the site.


This is a wonderful example of a technical solution that can enable teachers to produce materials for the low tech classroom. Some really simple but great ideas for providing students with motivating materials.

I hope you enjoy and use it with your students.

Related links:

• Dfilm - Dvolver Adds Embed Code
  
• Text to Speech Movies for EFL ESL
• Great Collection of Short Films
  
• Great Source of Animated Movies
• Text to Speech for EFL ESL Materials
• Creating audio-visual monologues
• Make you own animated movies
• Developing screencast tutorials

Best

Nik Peachey