At the beginning of the school year I held a series of small sessions with different departments aimed at introducing them to various web applications. We looked at blogs, wikis, voicethread and at the very end as a bit of a lark, ToonDoo.
A few weeks later I was contacted by the Economics/Business Studies teacher who expressed a great interest in using ToonDoo along with the work he was doing with storyboards. We took it on and ToonDoo took off! Soon after, Spanish and French jumped on the ToonDoo train and even Art is interested in its capacity to display pieces along brief comments. What draws people to ToonDoo is the fun they can have with telling their stories, without having to deal with too much on the technical side of things. We have recently learned how to alter the body stances and facial expressions of characters as well as create ToonBooks. The only thing I think could improve further is the number of frames offered for each Doo, which forces users to create parts 1, 2, 3 etc..
The excitement is far from over, as we have now discovered GoAnimate, a web app that goes a few steps further, allowing users to create short animated films on line. While many of the features are similar to ToonDoo, such as galleries of backgrounds, characters and props, GoAnimate stands apart allowing characters mobility, voices, background music as well as special effects my favourite of which is falling snow. It is also very 2.0ish in that users add their own graphics to the galleries, thereby generating a user created gallery shared by all!
Check out my first try below!
Link
No comments:
Post a Comment