Kindness Online is the Best

This term my lessons have been around Smart Relationships. With Room 3 @ St Bernadettes we used Interland: Kindess Kingdom as our inspiration for our own Smart Relationship animation using Google Slides. 

To be successful in this we learnt about using the shortcut Control D to duplicate objects and slides. We also learnt to group our drawings so that we could copy and move them easily. In publishing our animations onto our blogs, we learnt about editing the code so that the animation 

One of the challenges for the children was in making sure there was a clear message to their animation. They quickly gained the skills to create the animation but got so excited that the "why" wasn't there or very clear. We used small teams and the big screen in order for children to share and get feedback so that they could go back and improve. This was very powerful.

This is my teaching slides which I used for the students to see my process.

Using Biteable

Biteable is a great create tool. You can make standout videos in a snap with the Biteable video maker. It's easy to use and navigate around. You can use their templates or create your own by uploading images. Add animations, footage, sound and effects and you have a winning combination. Best of all the lite version is free. The lite version has the Biteable watermark through the video but that doesn't detract from the quality of the video or the content. It's also easy to share on blogs by exporting and then downloading to your computer.

Below is an example of one I made with some of the students in Room 3 at St Bernadettes this morning in our cybersmart session. They loved the many backgrounds and animations they could choose from.

Using Pixton Comics

 Today I have been having a play with Pixton Comics. Pixton allows you as a teacher to create a class and then children can sign into that class. Everyone creates an avatar and you can take class photos in different situations eg fairy tale, space, graduation ... You can then use your classmates avatars in your comics.

I want to use it for the children to create a comic for one of our Cybersmart sessions. Initially it took me a little time to understand how it worked and what all the different buttons could do but if you were looking for an easy way to present some information then it would definitely be a good choice. Once you learn all the different parts to it, I think that you could create some very high quality comics/storyboards to share learning, teach others or tell stories.

This was my finished example.