Stop Motion Animation

This week held a lot of sur­pris­es, fun, and learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for me. What seemed to be a straight for­ward assign­ment, “teach a class of grade three stu­dents how to use Zing Stu­dio to cre­ate their own stop motion ani­ma­tions”, turned out to be an extreme­ly impor­tant moment in my edu­ca­tion. I was giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to com­pare and con­trast this expe­ri­ence to pre­vi­ous in-situs, reflect on the vast dif­fer­ences and what fac­tors may be con­tribut­ing to them, gain some insight to what teach­ing looks like in dif­fer­ent school dis­tricts, and learn a lot about myself as a per­son and an educator.

I was real­ly excit­ed head­ing into week 7 of this course. We spent last week learn­ing about cre­at­ing graph­ics to use in our teach­ing mate­r­i­al and prac­ticed cre­at­ing our own stop motion ani­ma­tion videos! Look­ing back now, I real­ly appre­ci­at­ed the oppor­tu­ni­ty to famil­iar­ize myself with the pro­gram before head­ing into a class­room, as it helped me gain some con­fi­dence. (Not to men­tion the absolute blast we had cre­at­ing our video- you can watch this video over there! —>) By the end of week 6, I felt ful­ly pre­pared and excit­ed to take this to the next level.

What hap­pened that morn­ing went above and beyond my expec­ta­tions. Our class put­tered down to Marysville Ele­men­tary school, where we were intro­duced to the third grade stu­dents in Mrs. Romeo’s class. The first thing I noticed was how excit­ed these kids were to cre­ate stop motion videos. They wait­ed patient­ly on the car­pet while their teacher split them into groups, almost every one of them sport­ing an eager grin on their face. Ini­tial­ly, I didn’t know what to expect head­ing into the class­room. Our last in-situ expe­ri­ence using tech­nol­o­gy seri­ous­ly chal­lenged my abil­i­ty to adapt and work with unex­pect­ed cir­cum­stances, and while this served as a great les­son, I was real­ly hop­ing for a lit­tle more suc­cess this time around.

Our class was split into our co-teach­ing part­ners, where we were paired up with 2–3 of Mrs. Romeo’s stu­dents. My part­ner and I were paired up with two girls in almost-match­ing bright pink out­fits. They were very excit­ed. What sur­prised me next was how rarely we had to prompt the girls with ideas for their video. The cre­ativ­i­ty was flow­ing right off the bat, and before we knew it we were tak­ing our first frame. The team­work was near flaw­less; the girls both had a sim­i­lar vision for their video and fell into their roles of pho­to-tak­er and prop-mover nat­u­ral­ly. They accept­ed and praised eachother’s ideas, while some­how man­ag­ing to have the most fun they could pos­si­bly have at all times. The video turned out awe­some, and it was real­ly reward­ing to see how proud the girls were of their final project.

One of my main con­cerns head­ing into the class­room was whether or not we would run into any tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties. Luck­i­ly, the tech­nol­o­gy ful­filled its duties today and caused no unnec­es­sary com­pli­ca­tions. Work­ing this time with iPads, I actu­al­ly found most of the stu­dents were WAY more con­fi­dent with the tech­nol­o­gy than I was. This was a dra­mat­ic con­trast to my expe­ri­ence a few weeks ago using Epic Dig­i­tal Library and a set of class lap­tops. I real­ly wasn’t expect­ing this amount of suc­cess; I was pre­pared to walk the stu­dents through each step as we did with dig­i­tal read­ing, but this was pret­ty much the opposite.

I found this dif­fer­ence real­ly inter­est­ing, as the pre­vi­ous group we worked with was the exact same age. I think there are a few dif­fer­ent aspects con­tribut­ing to the vari­a­tions in the two dif­fer­ent in-situ experiences. 

1. The class­es we worked with came from two sep­a­rate school dis­tricts; one from dis­trict 5 and one from dis­trict 6. 
2. The grade three­’s teacher informed us that the major­i­ty of her stu­dents have already famil­iar­ized them­selves with Zing Stu­dio, the pro­gram used for our stop motion animations. 
3. We were work­ing with iPads instead of lap­tops; a device that most kids are already famil­iar with and com­fort­able with using. 
4. The way our groups were set up: 2–3 teach­ers paired up with 2–3 stu­dents. This set up allowed up for more one-on-one inter­ac­tion between stu­dents and teach­ers, and offered a more con­trolled feel to the project. 

This last point made me con­sid­er how this project may have turned out in a dif­fer­ent envi­ron­ment; one teacher and 25 stu­dents. I think hav­ing indi­vid­ual groups with equal amounts of sup­port real­ly helped these kids access their cre­ative side and have fun with the project, but I don’t think this expe­ri­ence would have had the same suc­cess if ran by one teacher.

I was also a lit­tle dis­ap­point­ed by this last point; I real­ly loved this project and I hoped to imple­ment it in my class­room one day, but I see now the high demand of super­vi­sion and sup­port a project like this calls for. Of course, it is still pos­si­ble. I think the best way for a teacher to present a project sim­i­lar to the one we did is to assign small groups with sim­i­lar inter­ests, ensure each group has a stu­dent who feels com­fort­able with the tech­nol­o­gy, and sched­ule each group a spe­cif­ic day or block of time to work on their project. I can see this as being a larg­er project that stu­dents work on through­out the semes­ter (or through­out the year for old­er grades), and present their final project to the class. I would love to allow stu­dents more time to play around with this tech­nol­o­gy and give them the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate some­thing great, maybe even inspire some stu­dents to pur­sue stop motion ani­ma­tion at home!