Welcome from Doc Geoff to our Christmas project. If you're tempted I'm here awaiting your email (see 4. below) - as they might say at a well run friendly service - replies in less than a six hours unless you're in Australia when I could be sleeping!

 

In 2000 all the Year 3 Pupils at Newbury Park Primary School created Christmas Greetings which they then sent all over the world by email as attachments. Alternatively they could have uploaded them to a web site (your school's) like here and they could just have sent the URL web address for their work in their email.

As a result of these emails being sent out they got lots of replies from parents and friends from all over the world . It was very successful!

If you do a similar project send me your messages and I'll be glad to reply - I also look a bit like Santa - at least that's what the kids in the London Underground 'Tube' think by the way they nudge their parents and whisper "Look over there" !

The results of this project in December 2007 along with the comments from the teachers that did them are shown here. There is work done at Martinadale Primary School with the children adding pictures to the animations which is also shown here. You can see the children were having a great time - and so were their teachers.

 

 

And here are a few ofthe animations done in 2000 by Year 3 :

 

1. They found it very rewarding and so much fun ! They went out ot the lesson 'walking tall' and I bet they were well behaved for the rest of the day because of their feelings of self esteem and having done something really special.

On Friday 17th November Chris Beedham did the project in a Warrington school with Year 5 and Year 6 in 50 minute slots. I had been invited to 'sit in' and came away very enthusiastic with the picture in my mind of a girl bursting with excitement, wringing her hands, while she waited impatiently for her turn to design her shape and fill it with a her colour. The lesson was buzzing with excitement till the very end when they got to see some of the work that they had created . What impressed me was that some of the Year 5 could figure out how I had manipulated their designs by using rotation symmetry and could even tell me that I'd rotated through 45 deg to get eight repeats and 60 deg for six. I shall be inviting them to change the design to five repeats and even seven ( to the nearest 0.1 deg). This is the advantage of Flash templates - nothing is tamper proof so anyone can go in and change how the template works - they are meant only as a starting point so both pupils and teachers can explore different variations on the theme. What's more they can access the software at home andthe 90 day trial of Flash 4 is free - its too simple for the modern web site designer but ideal for students aged 5 to 18. You too could be very soon designing your own templates for your particular class project and there are lots of other flash enthusiasts waiting in numerous web sites to share ideas and expertise. Even one to one tuition by me is available for free. (There are a growing number of others who will also help - John Davitt has even offered to help with some free teaching - he's an enthusiast too!)

 

2. To do this project you will first need to email Geoff for the free 90 day trial of Flash 4 - a simple version ideal for education (don't try using any other version!) , the permanent version is now available - through an arrangement with Adobe - price is at the moment being negociated but is likely to be in the region of £299 (600 US dollars) for a Primary school .

 

3. Now download the Flash template for this project, and the following tutorials show you exactly how to do the Christmas lesson in three steps:

a) Introduction and first half b) the second half that follows straight on and c) some extension work that could be used as part of a second lesson or could be used in the first lesson to stretch the pupils that are sailing through this project and would enjoy something extra to do! Having watched these you may feel ready to have a go in the classroom or in a computer club. However I would have thought that you would have a few questions so do contact me when we can arrange a brief chat.

 

4. At the moment many teachers are finding the above tutorials explain the use for Flash clearly but I reallyenjoy talking to everyone who has a query about something that occurs to them - new ideas quicklycome to inquisative minds! Make sure you contact me for help with this project on the phone or if you're ready to learn about another project! - gd at tygh.co.uk (done to avoid SPAM) Put Christmas or Flash in the subject heading and it will stand out (even if it's mid summer!)

 

5. We teachers that are enthusiastic about using Flash in schools share our ideas and projects at http://flashteachers.blogspot.com - have a look.

 

6. Flash can be used for any subject in your curriculum. There are already lots of templates - here are some and here are some more - they will work on PCs and Older Macs (before the 'Intel' processor) - have a think before you upgrade (I get round it on my new iMac by particioning it to operate in PC mode with Bootcamp opeating Windows XP - avoid the dreaded Vista at present - but even this can be made to work Flash 4 !

I've also done a presentation of some of the flash projects I've done to give a quick tour of Flash 4. There's also a good write up of my work thanks to Useful wiki. If you have problems downloading the Zip files then email me and I'll send them.