Tech Tool of the Week: GoAnimate

This week's featured technology tool is a terrific, easy-to-use tool for creating animated videos called GoAnimate. 

GoAnimate allows users to quickly and easily make videos consisting of animated characters. It features easy-to-use drag and drop tools and libraries filled with a variety of characters, props, backgrounds, and music. You can create your own characters and record yourself speaking, or use text-to-speech actors in over 20 languages. There is nothing to draw or download; everything is ready for you to use. Story lines can be as simple or complex as you wish, and with so many different options it is easy to differentiate for different students' needs.

Here at Chinese American International School, several of our Mandarin teachers are using GoAnimate with their students to create digital stories in Chinese. In our 5th grade Chinese classes, students recently completed a unit that focused on vocabulary related to the idea of "lost and found": losing an item and then trying to find it. Students created a dialogue in which one character loses an item and has to question other characters to try to find the missing item. After composing their scripts, students created a GoAnimate video to bring their skit to life. While GoAnimate does not support Pinyin input, students were able to copy the Chinese text from the typed version of their script and paste it into speech bubbles in their GoAnimate videos. The final step was to record their own voices reading the script. Using GoAnimate adds new dimensions to a project that was once strictly paper-and-pencil based. It allows children to creatively express their ideas, practice speaking Chinese, and create a final product that can be easily shared with a wider audience. Check out some samples of the finished products below!

What could you use GoAnimate for in your classroom? GoAnimate videos would be great for flipped classrooms, teacher lessons, student presentations, creating video tutorials, creative writing, and more. Here is a list of some other ways that schools around the globe are using GoAnimate with their students.

GoAnimate includes both a free and a paid version. It also offers special school subscriptions that allow teachers to set up classes and student accounts, keep student work private (if desired), monitor and review student work, allow downloading and sharing only with teacher approval, give kids access to characters/backgrounds/props that are school safe, and more. Our school subscribed for a site license. For more information on GoAnimate for Schools, click here.

To learn more about how to create a GoAnimate video, check out GoAnimate's YouTube playlist of "How-To's and Tutorials". Below is a short tutorial that includes a brief introduction to GoAnimate:

Tech Tool of the Week: Chinese Writer

Chinese Writer app by trainchinese

Here at Chinese American International School in San Francisco, where half of our students' daily instruction is conducted in Mandarin, one of our top priorities in educational technology is to identify tech tools for Chinese language instruction and practice. One of the tools that has been widely used by our Chinese faculty this year is an iPhone/iPad app called Chinese Writer. Chinese Writer is a game in which students can practice writing characters, study stroke order, and listen to pronunciation of characters. Its options for customizing characters for student practice are extremely valuable for our teachers.

In Chinese Writer, students tap on characters that fall from the top of the screen. Once they tap the character, they must quickly draw the character using the correct stroke order. While students are writing the character, they are also listening to an audio recording which allows them to listen to and practice the pronunciation of the character. After each game, students can review what they practiced and view stroke order diagrams if they need extra help remembering how to write a certain character.

Screenshots of the Chinese Writer app

Chinese Writer comes with its own, ready-made sets of characters that are divided into packs by difficulty level. In the free version, you can access several hundred of these characters. Additional character packs require an in-app purchase. Here at CAIS, we chose not to use the pre-set character packs but rather to create our own sets that are customized for our students' Chinese curriculum. In order to accomplish this, we set up a subscription on Chinese Writer's parent company website, trainchinese.com. Next we gathered vocabulary lists from our Lower School Chinese faculty. Based on these lists, we then created our own, customized "character packs", one for each grade level. We then downloaded the character sets from trainchinese directly into Chinese Writer. Students enjoy racing against the clock to write the characters in time before they fall to the bottom! This app has proven to be a valuable tool for practicing characters in our Chinese classrooms this year.

To see Chinese Writer in action, check out the brief demo video below:

Tech Tool of the Week: Wallwisher

Happy New Year and welcome back to school! This week's feature is an incredibly fun, versatile, FREE tool called Wallwisher. Wallwisher is an online multimedia bulletin board. It allows students to post their thoughts on a common topic using electronic sticky notes on a shared digital wall.

Think of Wallwisher like an electronic corkboard. You create a board, then share that address with your students, who can then go on to the board and simply click on it to add their comments. Students can not only add comments but also links to images, videos, or websites. And they can do all this without ever having to sign in! Best of all, it works on both laptops and iPads!

What can you do with Wallwisher? There are many potential applications of this tool in the classroom. For instance, you could use Wallwisher to pose a question, get students' answers, and give them feedback - all on the same page. Check out Wallwisher.com for great examples of different kinds of walls. Here is an example of a wall where a teacher posted a Word of the Day and asked each student to write a sentence using that word.  Other possible uses include: collecting feedback from students; making lists; sharing videos; and brainstorming ideas. You could use Wallwisher for collaboration to share ideas, resources, and thoughts on a topic. You could use it to create a KWL chart and ask students to share what they know and what they want to know about a topic. Lots of different possibilities!


To learn more about using Wallwisher, check out the video tutorial below.