TallisTube

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

Thomas Tallis School is a specialist Arts status college in Kidbrooke, South East London, and have recently made the decision to set up YouTube throughout the school. They have set up a profile called Tallis Tube, where videos from all departments can be posted. I particularly like this video, which shows how mobiles might be used in lessons such as biology to explain processes – although this student needs to be taught how to hold the camera still…

It is inspiring to see a school prepared to adopt the use of web 2.0 applications so enthusiastically and, in particular at a Senior Management level. At Thomas Tallis college, Jon Nicholls, the Assistant Head, who I met for the first time at the BETT show in Olympia earlier this year, has been at the forefront of pushing the school towards the use of popular open-source applications such as Flickr and YouTube. Click here to visit his school blog.

Lennon Speech Animation

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

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.