Another great day in primary 3. Happy, involved cooperative, communicative children, the buzz was hypnotic. A day when I love my job, when I can allow my children to take charge, at age 7. There was no chaos, I must assure those doubters. And to those concerned still with 3-18 strands, everything the children did today was on strands (level C and E) that were well beyond those laid down for P3, (levels A and B) but there were things they were asking about as a ‘need to know.’ Since they felt the need to know, I believe they will remember, much longer than if it had been something I thought they should know. I did not lay a hand on the computers or children that produced the following, did no editing or saving, so what you see is exactly what they did, by themselves. They feel empowered and don’t feel the need to exert any other negative behaviourals, so I am able to relax there too.
They will add the sound next week. I might have to take my feet off my desk to show them how to do that!
Lovely, really nice movies, Please pass on my congratulations and admiration to the children, I know how hard this is.
Maybe when you have a moment you could describe the classroom organisation in more detail?
Kit, groups, timing etc.
Did you use the inbuilt isight in a macbook or a firewire one. (I’ve now got some macbooks, but am wondering how to use the cameras.)
I have a small class, of 20, and three children were out of the classroom for a portion of the time. The children all modelled heads, with interchangeable expressions. They then drew and cut out two bodies, all the while, thinking about what could have happened to change the expressions. How could we make them look like they were moving or blinking? They then wrote their scenarios individually, and explained what was going to happen to their cameraman, who also made suggestions to improve.
We started out on the whiteboard to show the children how the application worked and what they would need to prepare, before they went on computer. They all had a five minute exploration of the application in pairs. We started out using the isight camera, hand held because the modelled heads had to be on a flat surface, and then changed over to dv cameras with no cartridge in, for better definition. We had two cameras on tripods, and two computers. The others were still working on listing what shots they must capture such that their story would be explained in a few seconds, and latterly how many shots they would need for 3,4,5, and 10 seconds of film at various shots per second speeds.
Quality discussion and problem solving.
The two examples above took about 20 minutes of computer time per pair, one animating, and the other capturing the shots when instructed, by the animator/director. The scenery was green paper sellotaped to a blue table.
If we had had a stand up storyboard and blu tacked paper figures onto them we could have used the macbooks and their cameras, might be a wee bit tricky to align them and not photograph hands on computer, so a mouse, or working on the whiteboard might be the answer there. We currently don’t have the adaptors to use them with the whiteboard.
To get to this stage took the equivalent of a whole school day. We have used the cameras to take snaps of themselves for a PSD thing and imported them to Kidspiration.
Hi Marlyn,
Thanks for taking the time to post all the details, they are really useful.
Apologies for not getting back sooner, cocomment let me down:(
i guess you use iStopmotion?
No John, I have been using I can Animate. Oscar’s other baby. P3 took to it very quickly. I must get some time to post the finished results.