SAM Animation is another fantastic piece of free, cross platform, software that is ideal for schools and homes. SAM originally stood for “Stop Animation Movies” which indicates what it does. The software has been designed by the TUFTS Centre For Engineering, Education and Outreach, with the noble purpose of:

-  increasing student and teacher excitement for learning STEM;

-  improving student & teacher skills so learning is more enjoyable in all subjects;

-  increasing the general public’s technological literacy, and

-  increasing the awareness of the importance of STEM for society.

(STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)

SAM Animation is easy enough for primary aged students to use, with impressive results, but would be equally  suitable for older students or adults wanting an application to illustrate a concept or tell a story. It has a variety of sophisticated tools to capture, import and manipulate images and sound. It even has the ability to apply the chroma key effect. Pictures can be imported or added directly using a camera.

Once you have finished your animation there are options to export it into various movie formats which means it is portable for home computers and easily published to a blog or wiki.

The SAM Animation site has a very thorough “help” section with easy to follow movies. It has links to “Latest Animations”, “Related Web Sites”,  research, a forum and community. You can try the online version or download it for your personal use or for educational research. If you register as an educator your principal will need to verify the details that you have supplied but then you are able to use SAM in your school.  All this and its free! Schools and families should definitely make the SAM investment!

There are a number of projects that students have completed using SAM Animation and Tux Paint on our school LEEP blog.

Tux of Math Command – more Free Software

Tux of Math Command (Tux Math for short) is in the same vain as the other Tux programs designed for children, particularly Tux Typing and Tux Paint which I have reviewed in previous blogs. A free to download for desktop computers with various operating systems.This would be a nice addition to the collection of educational software that children are likely to choose to use.

It is a drill and practice application for students who are practicing simple addition up to those who are working with the four operations with positive and negative numbers. Another section includes fractions and factors.

The features include

training sessions with more than 50 types of problems,

arcade games where you have to solve the problems before they hit the bottom of the screen,

single player and multiplayer games,

a hall of fame.

It combines colourful graphics, with game-like challenges of aiming and shooting a light beam while solving math problems. I am sure students will also enjoy the opportunity to challenge each other in the multiplayer version of the games. This is another winner for the Tux4Kids developers who produce their programs under the  GNU General Public License

Related Posts Tux4Kids

Tux Typing is another great free program that you can download onto your computer to encourage children to practice their typing skills. It is like Tux Paint in that it is appealing and entertaining.

It is not a touch typing tutor but if your children are ready to become touch typists this program could help them develop their skills in typing speed and accuracy. I’ve always been of the opinion that you can only teach children touch typing when they decide that they want to develop that skill for themselves, so if they are ready, this is one of the programs they could use which would make the process fun and engaging

Images

“Tux Paint is free, Open Source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is developed by volunteers around the world.”

Tux Paint is an attractive drawing package for students and it runs on a variety of platforms. It is easy to use with other programs such as Photostory and Voicethread as the files save automatically with the PNG format.

The folder where you save files can be altered using the graphical interface supplied with the download which is excellent! The network administrator can nominate the folder where the drawings save. And the automatic save feature means that even the most inexperienced students can create and keep their drawings.
Tux Paint has all the features you would expect of a drawing program and some unique ones too.

This is a delightful piece of software! Students from Prep to grade 6 love it.

For more screenshots of TuxPaint click here.

And to see some very impressive examples browse the Gallery

I have already written about Wordle, the application that makes beautiful word clouds, and how it can be used in your classroom. At the end of the 2008 school year our Grade 6 students chose 5 words to describe their year, added their name their grade name and put all the words into one class Wordle. It created a snapshot of the year for each grade of Year 6 students.

The same could be done at the beginning of the year by asking for their expectations. Add the students photos around the outside, print it as A3 and it should make a great door poster.

Remember the more often a word is used the larger it appears in the final picture. You can change the way it looks including the alignment, colours and direction of text. Wordle leaves out the words it thinks are unimportant but you can control which words are excluded.

Here are some more ideas on how to use Wordle with your students thanks to Angelia Myers and The Top 20 Uses for Wordle in the Classroom presented by Rodd Lucier. The following are my favourites for a primary classroom

1. Combine student ‘Who Are You?’ introductions, or ‘Superhero
   Traits‘ to develop a class composite;
2. Condense survey data by dumping content of questionnaire responses into the Wordle engine;
3. Combine news articles or RSS feeds on a given topic;
4. Turn an essay into a poster;

Now try and finish the poem using the words in the Wordle.

Whole Duty of Children by Robert Louis Stevenson

A child should always say ______ ____,
And _____ when he is spoken to,
And behave _______ __ ___ _____:

At _____ as far as he is able.

Just for fun – Guess the following famous Australian songs:

If you want to download the free software called Scratch you can find it here

What is Scratch?

Scratch is a programming based software but the scripts snap together in Lego like blocks. It can be used to create interactive stories, animations, music, games, art and simulations. Scratch has an online community where students can share their projects. If they have access to the Internet they can become a member of the community and upload their projects, create galleries of their favourite projects, make comments about, and see the work of others.

Sharing of work is encouraged. You can download a project, create a remix and share it in your own gallery but you will find that all the contributors have been acknowledged. Sharing and improving a project is encouraged and valued. AND Scratch is free!

“Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab, with financial support from the National Science Foundation and the Intel Foundation. The software is available free of charge from http://scratch.mit.edu.”
(http://www.media.mit.edu/press/scratch/)

Wordle is…

Wordle lets you create artistic word clouds with your writing or just a bunch of words that you might choose to use to describe something. It will give greater prominence to the more frequent words and exclude the “stop words” (words too common to visualise). The colors and designs can be customised, its free and your Wordle is yours to do as you want with it! How good is that.

Some uses for Wordle

* If you put your student’s writing into Wordles over a period of time you could see if their vocabulary is developing and if they are using subject specific language so it is possible to use Wordle as an assessment tool.
* I’ve used it as a form of art work mixed with photos and for backgrounds on pages in the school magazine. It was a great way to highlight the key words for my subject in an interesting way that would catch the readers attention with a glance.
* Use it to summarise a piece of writing.

Suggestions from the SMARTboard lessons podcast

* It could be a springboard for predicting texts. Copy a couple of key paragraphs of a text that you are using with your students to create a Wordle and then let the students predict what the text might be about and they can become familiar with unfamiliar words before beginning their reading.
* Comparing texts a lesson for secondary schools.

If you have any suggestions please add them in the comments for others to share.

Click the link below to see the MindMap as a slideshow – much easier to read

4 Delicious Ways at School

To start a new Delicious account click here

For Bookmarklet buttons click here

Bookmarklets (Buttons) are links you add to your browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar. They are an easy way to post and view your bookmarks on the Delicious.

www.voicethread.com

A very cool tool! Voice thread allows you to annotate a slide show with audio files from multiple sources. A collaborative, multimedia, web 2.0, FREE web application.

This is a link to a nice little video/screencast made by students about "How to Voicethread"

This is a pbwiki with lots of examples and information about Voicethread.

This is a one minute tutorial to get you started.

This is a Ning with some very good ideas for using Voicethread and links to examples in maths and science and english for various age groups.

Voicethreads could be a good way for a class to do a book review.  I like this example, seems very achievable.

A site that creates word pictures with your text.

http://wordle.net/

You can paste the students writing into a Wordle and it will arrange all the words emphasising the most common ones. It will help to show development in the students writing and vocabulary or it just a nice way to summarise a piece of writing.