Look, It Can Dance!

We had a great time today with a new tool I discovered on a site recommended by Kelly Christopherson.  Pictaps is first of all a drawing tool.  It gives you choices of shapes or lines, choices of colour and choices of line thickness.  It starts you with a basic body shape outline, but you can change this shape to whatever form you like.  After you have completed your “creation” it turns the drawing into a dancing video which you can embed on your blog.  My students were absorbed drawing their own monsters and even more captivated when they got to watch them dance.  Even the ones who got the “error” message (I think twenty-four was too many on the site at once) were happy to try again, and in some cases again.

 

I can’t get it to embed in WordPress, (suggestions welcomed) but you can check out Deigan’s monster, Dancing Bob.

 

 

 

 

Proving It

Last spring I blogged about a research project that Etty Rosen, a researcher from Israel, was doing about my classroom blog.  She sent questionnaires to each of the parents in my class, asking them to rate a wide range of items including Internet access, visits to our blog and involvement with their child.  She recently finished compiling the data, and was kind enough to send me a copy of her spreadsheet.  Some of the results are below. It is interesting to note that three years ago, less than one third of the children in my classroom had Internet access at home.  That has changed dramatically.

 

The results are overall very positive.  Obviously, I wouldn’t keep blogging with my students unless I felt it was valuable, but it is nice to have some research to back up what I think is happening.