Monday, November 14, 2016

Week 12



Self-directed Learning using Feedly




Animatron: Animation Creation for Teachers and Students

I read an article in "The Ed Tech Round UP" site about a free and simple to use animation creator application called "Animatron". This app allows teachers and students create short videos for presentations, and I think it would work well for 6-12 teachers and students. Users will need to register with the website. When you run the app, Animatron will load a blank canvas, and users can add content, in form of images, pictures, text, shapes, lines, and more. As users add content, they will see the content represented as “layers”. Users can adjust the order and length in which the content appears in their video. Once content has been added, users can toggle between the “Design” and “Animation” settings. Users can add multiple canvases to their video. Also they can set transitions between their canvases, and if they wish, they can add a voiceover to their video.

Animatron is cloud based app, so no installations and no plugins are needed. It is built on HTML5 technology which allows to work on both, desktop computers and mobile devices. The software is intuitive, so it makes it very easy to learn. It features a free Marketplace with hundreds of pre-animated characters, props and backgrounds that allow creating animations in minutes. The app also offers importing options. It is possible to import fonts, images, video and audio in various formats to be used when creating a video or animation. Animatron allows two or more people to work simultaneously on one project in real time which makes it an important feature for us in Education.





QuizPedia: Free Online Quizzes for Teachers and Students



I read other an article also in "The Ed Tech Round UP" site about an online quiz creation resource similar to Kahoot! and Quizizz, but with the difference that this app was designed primarily for students to create quizzes. QuizPedia is a quiz tool that turns the tables and let the students make quizzes instead of the teacher. This makes them co-creators of knowledge and strengthens their skills.

In order to create their own multi-modal quizzes students must be able to research, evaluate and validate information and they must distil their knowledge down to a few key questions. This forces them to reflect about the subject from different angles. What do I know about this? What is most important? How do I best present my knowledge to my peers?

And not only do the students obtain knowledge while researching and creating the quiz, the quiz can also help them retain that knowledge if they take the quiz again at a later time, perhaps studying for an exam on the subject.




 

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