Our 9th grade English students used GoAnimate to create visual versions of a written argument. They wrote an essay taking a position on who was responsible for the deaths of Romeo and Juliet; they used GoAnimate for a visual version for presentation. CCSS asks students to write arguments and to present their findings. GoAnimate allows students an engaging way to present their findings to the class using technology. Pairing the use of technology and writing in an assignment allows students to be better prepared for both college and career.

One major focus in my classroom this year has been reflecting on and synthesizing our learning. Because of that, each of my students has an ePortfolio where they can show off their work and write a reflection on the process. Since we typically reflect on our learning through words, I thought it would be fun to try to reflect orally for a change!

GoAnimate offers students an excellent platform to pose questions and respond with answers since characters interact within a scene. It also works great for the teacher to provide students with several questions that they respond to.

GoAnimate for Schools friend and evanglist Olga Schrivner recently presented “Fun and Motivation through Animation” at the World Language Festival at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.

We are thrilled to share this blog post covering her presentation by James Scrivner (NortonHealthcare) and Olga Scrivner (Associate Instructor in French, Indiana University).

For Olga’s complete presentation, please click here.

Our vision for learning at our school is to create a classroom environment that is collaborative and creative. We value the idea that technology, and it’s integration into the classroom, must be purposeful. The concept of digital storytelling pervades all content areas and is peppered throughout the Common Core, and I was looking for a tool that would allow students to tell a story that was interactive and engaging. We have found GoAnimate for Schools to be a tool that provides a simple, yet intuitive platform for storytelling.

When you look up the word “engaging” in the dictionary, you will find it’s spelled, “G-o-a-n-i-m-a-t-e.” Nah, just kidding, but GoAnimate for Schools really is that good!

I discovered GoAnimate for Schools during the 2011-2012 school year, and I have been a huge fan ever since. GoAnimate for Schools does just what the name implies, it allows students the ability to animate whatever they like, and boy is it fun!

McCombs Middle School in Des Moines, IA. Staff and students create a video to prepare for the Iowa Assessments. This is not an original song, the music is from the song “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore. The lyrics have been changed to highlight testing goals:

Museums, and particularly museum children’s programs, are a new concept for Laos. Because of that, it is harder to draw local children to our activities—they are unsure of what we are. Some kids from the neighborhood come and do our print-based activities, but if we had something for them to watch, I’m sure there would be much more interest. That’s why I was thinking we might be able to use your service to make a short animation series, or a longer video and host a children’s movie event—either after school, a weekend morning, or in the evening—to draw more children to our space and ignite discovery and interest in the rest of our resources.

In Digital Citizenship my students engage with Pixton and GoAnimate! apps to create cautionary tales or public service announcements for assigned Digital Citizenship topics (i.e. sexting, cyberbullying, online predators, copyright infringement, etc). The apps offer a lot of room for creativity and learning, students enjoy the activities and their final projects allow me to see if they really understand the lessons.

With the introduction of the new Common Core State Standards, teachers are challenged to bring more non-print texts into the classroom. Educators who are serious about meeting these standards are well served by considering the reality behind the idea of “digital natives.” While our students may be able to use video games, Web sites, or mobile devices, that does not mean they are born with the ability to create and critique multimodal digital texts. The rhetoric surrounding “digital natives” often creates the perception that all students can jump on a computer and produce digital creations professionals would envy. While many adolescents do cultivate new literacies outside of school, their abilities rarely transfer to advanced digital composition skills in school. The truth is that transferring from multimedia “consumer” to multimedia “creator” is a learning process like any other.

The challenge facing educators today is getting young children into the idea of writing for communication. I find that it is one of the hardest areas for me to do as I teach my class of 10 and 11 year old children.

Why are we actually learning to write? Is it just to fill the pages of the exercise book? To demonstrate that we are capable of reproducing what you are telling us? To practise those elements of punctuation and spelling that are taught on other days? Are these the thoughts running through their heads?

Perhaps one of the most liberating moves in the recent changes to the Northern Ireland Curriculum was that Communication was recognised as being in many different forms – not just the writing on the page. This meant that children could be encouraged to Communicate in many different forms – written, spoken, blog, website, etc. This is where discovering GoAnimate has helped the process of children realising that Communication can take many different forms and have many different purposes.