Hoeben’s Blog

What better way to get students out of the classroom that through GPS drawing? The concept is actually quite simple: students are asked to design a shape on a map or open area and then given a GPS tracking device – imagine a hand-held TOM TOM. Using their shape as the guide, students then turn on their GPS tracking device, which traces their geographical position. In effect, they are able to draw by physically moving around with the device – otherwise referred to as a “geodetic pencil”. The results can be uploaded to a computer and transposed onto a map.

Click here to see case studies of GPS drawing projects in education.

What’s the educational value? Apart from burning off a few calories, it helps students develop a spatial awareness, explore the local area, translate concepts between different dimensions, think laterally, problem-solve and, hopefully, enjoy being away from the desk. It is also a great for cross-curricular collaboration between subjects such as art, geography and ICT.

Other possibilities include “geocaching”, more of which can be read about by clicking here.

This great animation was recently produced by director Josh Raskin and animator Alex Kurina and uses the original interview recording between a 14 year old and John Lennon in 1969. I particularly like the way it is a continuous animation with few scene cuts, allowing the illustrator to playfully mutate from one scene to another.

A simple project might be to get students to create an animation of a famous speech using a combination of their own drawings and photographic images to illustrate some of the key concepts, eventually exporting as a video podcast. Alternatively, they could just create a simple animation based on the notion of metamorphosis; the transformation from one form into another.

If you cannot afford Screen Flow, then Jing is a great application that can be installed on your computer as a remote application and then shared online, in your blog or downloaded to your computer

Here is an example of a simple tutorial using Jing to record:

GoAnimate, the web 2.0 free animation software site, is excellent and very easy tool to edit with. I had a little play this morning and wasted the last two hours trying to tweak it. Here’s my result… albeit not the funniest of comic animations:

If it loads too slowly, visit the original location by clicking here.