Last month, we announced our first annual Summer Video Challenge, where readers were asked to submit a one-minute video created with PowToon, GoAnimate, or Explee — three online tools that make it fun and easy to create your own animated videos.
The winning video comes from Cristina Mella, a Spanish teacher at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Riverdale, NY. She submitted in the category of Model Projects — teacher-created examples of projects students can do themselves.
“The idea is to encourage my students to have fun creating and animating their own short stories in Spanish,” says Cristina. “We will write little scripts in Spanish during class and they will work in teams to create short animations using Go Animate. The different groups will present the final product to the rest of the class.”
This sounds like such a fun project. I’m sure Cristina’s students will have a great time doing it, and in the process, they will be exposed to lots of language not only from their own videos, but from those created by their classmates.
Here’s Cristina’s video:
Because the video is in Spanish, Cristina has provided us with this summary:
Antonio Morales is showing off his dancing skills to his friend Leonor. She is not quite impressed and compares him to a dancing fly. A police officer enters the scene and accuses him of horrific dancing and demands to know who is responsible for teaching him to dance. Antonio, clearly offended and in defense of his skills, looks into the camera and asks, “What do you think?”
I was excited to see this submission because it highlights a really cool feature I didn’t mention in my review of GoAnimate: its capacity to handle language. When you create a GoAnimate video, you are offered a choice of languages and voices, so your characters will not only speak whatever language you tell them to, they will do it with perfect pronunciation. The possibilities for foreign language instruction (not to mention theater arts) are huge.
If you’ve never given these tools a try yourself, make this the year you do it. We’ll run another video challenge next summer with the same options we gave this time (and maybe a few more), so you can get started early! If you missed the deadline to submit this year but would still like to share your efforts, post a link to your video in the comments — I would love to see more of these!
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As our winner, Cristina will receive a free item from our store — the Red Marigold Mug, part of the Marigold Collection.
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