When my students took home the video and photo release form, requesting permission to allow my students to participate in my Full Sail University action research project, a few parents refused to sign it and said they were concerned about putting photos and videos of their child on the Internet. One suggestion a student made, was to turn at least the pictures of the student into a comic or animation. I experimented with Vokis last month and liked them very much but they run ads along with the animation. See www.voki.com
I experimented with FotoFlexer. It is a Web 2.0 tool that is free and allows you to turn your photos into cartoon like images. Check out the video below for more about the website www.fotoflexer.com
I wouldn’t mind having all of our Earth Day Ning site (or another kind of website) be all comics or animations; they appeal to the middle school student and might make parents more comfortable. My students are familiar with numerous science animations I use to teach the life science curriculum and will watch them over and over again until they understand the concept. One popular animation I use is an animation of the process of mitosis. Go to http://www.cellsalive.com/mitosis.htm to see a cool biology animation.
In George-Palilonis & Belcher (2009) a physicist and a journalist collaborated to make an animation to be used to teach electromagnetism to college students and stated that “future research and development for interactive multimedia texts is limitless”. You can see their amazing physics animations that are being used this year at MIT at http://web.mit.edu/viz/EM/flash/E&M_Master/____LAUNCH.html
If you have any other ideas for making our own comics or animations please send them my way.
George-Palilonis, J., & Belcher, J. (2009). Visualizing electricity and magnetism:
the collaborative development of a multimedia text. International Journal
of the Book, 6(2), 107-114. Retrieved from Humanities International Complete database.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
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Laurie,
ReplyDeleteLoved that extra mile by creating the video. I'm curious, did the parent agree after the student suggested the comic theme?
The screenflow is a nice addition to your post!
ReplyDeleteSuggestion: Consider adding links to your posts versus the web address. To do this, high-light a word (like mitosis) then hit the link-chain icon. It will then prompt you for the web address.
Maybe it's just user error, too many windows open, and a looong day but, it took me 4 times to get to the mitosis animation because I neglected to copy the entire link. (I kept getting an error message.) When I finally got the whole think, I was surprised to view how fast the animation goes! I understand why the students would have to go over this again & again. What a neat feature for ms students to see in the science class!
Love the Screenflow!!! Great job Laurie. I hadn't considered that having a photo online can pose dangers for MANY, not just a few who are Internet-phobic. I like the idea of using animation and cartoons and am sure this could work well in the Corporate Sector. We have HUGE copyright issues to contend with so when we use our own images, we often need to get clearance from the legal dept. This approach gives us another outlet as we can remove branded content from our own images then convert them to animated/cartoon images. I'll still get clearance but I'm sure our legal team is more open me to using a cartoon version of our bldg instead of a real photo.
ReplyDeleteI can some issues with trying to obtain permission from parents to use their students images and videos in publicly published projects. I am still approaching this hurdle myself. I am still trying to word a well crafted letter to parents.
ReplyDeleteMy principal pointed out our student handbook states that students may be photographed or video taped while at school and published on the web. If a parent objects to this they must notify the school.
Instead of trying to obtain permission from every parent before hand I will probably try to obtain permission from parents that have children featured in my end project. This may make paper chasing easier, but at the same time the school policy can cover me. I hope.
Excellent suggestion Jeinine all websites are now links.
ReplyDelete