Looking for something fun as teaching draws to an end and assignment hell descends upon us, I thought that I would try out Go!Animate. The idea of the service is that you can quickly and easily make an animation, you choose characters from a number of presets (or build them yourself) and give them voices by typing in a script which is converted by the built in text to speech app. This works pretty well and includes a reasonable selection of accents (including British), and you also have the option of recording a soundtrack yourself and uploading it. There is a basic free service, and a number of paid options. I will return to this later.
The scope for the use of animation in education is wide: introductions to topics, revision, light-hearted ways to get tricky points across, even collaborative or individual video production by learners is feasible. I was impressed by the ease of use: going from first visiting the webpage to registering, looking at the tutorials and making a test video took less than half and hour. I think that with a bit of practice you could easily turn out a thirty second video in around than five minutes. This is an important point; I had intended to trial Prezi this week however in the hour I allotted to learn and test it I did not manage to produce a finished product. This was partly down to the site not importing a pre-prepared PowerPoint presentation (not figured out why yet) and partly to my wanting to tweak too much to get things just right. As such, Prezi might not meet all my requirements for ITC solutions: they have to be easy to learn and practical and quick to use (I have not given up on Prezzi by the way and hope to revisit it soon).
So, Go!Animate passes my ease of use tests. So far, so good, but what about the downside? Well, the free service is rather restricted, Go!Animate really want you to pay them a monthly subscription. Fair enough, they are a commercial company, but I am looking for free teacher resources here. With the free basic account you are limited to videos of no more than two minutes in length; this is not a great problem, keep them short and snappy is a good maxim. You could also do several short linked videos and use the breaks for discussion. The next restriction is more of a problem: limited sharing options with no downloads. You get a url you can paste into a worksheet or a presentation, or an embed code, but that is it. You cannot download the video to edit yourself, and you cannot post it to YouTube without forking out some cash. You are therefore slightly at the mercy of their continued largess, I am a bit reluctant to invest too much time into creating resources on a service that (potentially) could deny me access to that work at some point in the future. Not likely to happen, but it is a nagging doubt and a disincentive.
Learner reaction so far has been very positive. I will leave experimenting with getting them try to make videos on their own until next academic year: this could be useful as an alternative and additional method of assessment.
So, will I be using Go!Animate regularly in the future? Probably yes. It is so quick and easy that I see it as a good way to make rapid but effective recaps of previous lessons, especially dealing with points learners found difficult. The free version is limited, but good enough to be useful. Not one to deploy every week perhaps, but as part of a suite of ITC applications it has the potential to be a handy addition to my teaching toolkit.
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