Innovation Profile 008

Primary schools explore animation

We live in a new-media world. Much of the information we receive comes to us through TV and multimedia, but very little multimedia is used in the work produced by school pupils.

This will change but there are many educational issues to be considered. Teachers in Staffordshire, UK, are exploring what their pupils can learn by producing animations on computers.

Friarswood School, who are using Macromedia Flash software with some of their pupils, were invited to provide a demonstration at the Staffordshire County Council Quality Teaching Service Conference, in February 2002.

A class of pupils spent the day at the conference, each producing a Flash animation. The animations were then shown to the teachers at the conference who were very impressed. Many of these teachers are now finding out how to use Flash themselves. You can see some of the pupils' animations on the school web site, www.friarswood.staffs.sch.uk. It is obvious that these young children gave a great deal of thought to what they wished to communicate through their animation and how it should be designed and presented.

Teachers think it important for pupils to create many different styles of writing, to help them understand the different kinds of text they will need to be able to read. Surely we should also enable young people to 'write' multimedia, so that they gain more understanding of the multimedia they experience every day of their lives.

If more schools in Europe can find time to explore the use of animation or multimedia software with their pupils it will be possible to have an informed debate about how new media skills can best be introduced into school curricula. Please let us know if you are exploring this area. It is important that more young people become expert in this area as there is already a major shortage of adults with new media skills. Work that could be done by people in Europe is being passed to India and other countries.

To find out more about new media software for animation, web design and other uses, look at www.macromedia.com/fr (or /de, /it, /es, /uk etc.)

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If you know of examples of innovative use of ICT-for-learning that others would be interested in, please email innovations@eep-edu.org

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