Animation and Audio

These last two weeks have been full of exploring and experimenting. I ended up using Alice for my animation after playing with both Alice and another program that my CIT told me about called Scratch. I originally thought I would do a water cycle animation because that was coming up in my curriculum, but I soon found that it was very hard to find the graphics I needed. Alice was more friendly to use once I watched the tutorials and had some help from Melinda and Dr. Smolka. Scratch was a little more high tech and was not as user friendly for a first time user with no guidance. Once I got down Alice, I really liked playing with it. Not that I did not get frustrated trying to move my aniamtions one way or the other! Argh that was tough. The downfall to Alice is finding objects to use that you like and that can pertain to your lesson.

Audio was much easier for me. I used Audacity and found it very user friendly. I have had my students start using Audacity to record themselves reading to check for fluency.