GoAnimate!

I haven't found many collaborative Web 2.0 tools that I can use in my current program. I only see the students for 30 minutes at a time and our curriculum is bursting at the seams. One tool I have managed to use in class that is quick and wonderful is goanimate.com. I got the idea from Lori when she used it for our online class this semester. I have used in a few of my classes now and the students love it! Not only does it capture their attention, it also affords something I cannot do: it shows adult characters speaking in Spanish, using the vocabulary we are learning. It is very difficult to find any videos out there that use the exact thing we are learning, much less in Spanish! With goanimate, I can make a dialogue using vocabulary and sentence structure that I am teaching quickly and for free (!!) to model something, rather than trying to do it all on my own. I have had students not understand that they are having a conversation with another person and try to say both question and answer on their own because of not being able to more properly model this skill. Now, I can set up a video beforehand that students can watch to see how things are really supposed to go.

This tool has other affordances also! I can easily get the laptop cart and put the students in small groups to make their own videos, showing that they understand the material in a different way. My students have plenty of opportunities to speak in front of one another and are bored out of their minds with it. If they were watching each other's videos, I am sure they would be more interested and could have the opportunity to learn new things from each other. They would have to design their dialogue beforehand on paper, of course, which would require a lesson on designing. They would also need some way of saving the videos so we could all watch them together. I wonder if I could get headphone splitters and just have them leave the videos open on the laptops and circulate around the room watching and listening to them? That would certainly make it faster and easier than trying to save them all and open them on the computer attached to the Promethean board. Or, I could just attach each laptop directly to the Promethean board. So many possibilities...

There are so many things to think about when trying a new tool in the classroom! I have found that even with all that thought, if I talk about it with other people, they will always have a different perspective that leads me in a new direction (hey, isn't that collaboration?). Of course, I am so energetic about this stuff that I can't help but talk about it with my colleagues (and sometimes even parents).