Nov 30 2008
Online animation – useful in the classroom?
This animation was very easy to make. Honest. Try it out yourself at goanimate.com.
I don’t plan on setting my grade 5 students loose on the site for the time being. There are too many bikini-clad characters, bars (of the drinking establishment kind), weapons and the like. Most entertaining, which, of course, is a tad risky for our ultra-conservative sensibilities. 
There is mention on the site, of creating a teacher-friendly version. I’m hopeful that will happen.
Still, it’s a fun way to hook people, young or old, and the results are pretty professional. I can see it being used at the start of a presentation or lesson.
Another con: Edublogs and Wordpress don’t allow the movies to be embedded properly. The Firefox browser almost seems to work – but doesn’t. Internet Explorer just creates an empy box. This issue is discussed in goanimate.com’s forums:
Blogs based on Wordpress do not allow embedding videos. The code that you pasted got trimmed when you saved your post. Only embedding from certain sites (like YouTube) can work as a result on EduBlogs. We are working on our side to contact Wordpress and see if there is a way to enable that in the future, but for now nothing much we can do. We will keep you posted if we find any way around this.
So, I faked it. I took a screenshot of the opening frame, cropped it with Fireworks (similar to PhotoShop) and uploaded it to Edublogs as a picture. I then made the picture link to the goanimate.com site.
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I watched your animation. It looks amazing.
I have taken my first step towards podcasting at my school with Windows Media player. We haven’t published our work anywhere yet and I will be exploring sites to find a place for that as well.
But yeah, if we could get to do some animation as well, it would be simply fantastic. We are a K-5 school so the issue of some mature content on the site is definitely to be considered. Thanks for the link.
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