Last week I posted about the end of Flash, one of the thing I regretted was the loss of a tool to teach animation.
My skills in this department are limited, but if you look closely you will see the person in the animation is moving his arms and legs. They are a clip.
The flash vacuum is being filled before it exists.
Last week Adobe announced that they would stop supporting Flash in 2020.
Although in the age of mobile and tablets Flash content has become less important there still is a lot of educational material, especially games, that uses Flash.
Back at the end of the last century I used flash to make resources for teaching I even used this old one and this one in class this year.
I also used Flash to teach animation in class. Although Flash is expensive at the time I used it you could get cheap education copies and the software was less complicated.
Sandaig Primary School: Computer Club (on the Internet archive) still has some of the work we did.
I’ve just had a trip down memory lane, Littlefish Flash lists some of the things I did with Flash and also links to a pile of worksheets I made for my pupils.
Looking back I remember how exciting, for me, to be able to learn and teach about layers, frames, bitmap and vector graphics.
One of the introductory exercises we did was to use flash to trace our faces. The same technique was popular with my class using iPad apps this year.
I’ve read a lot online about the problems with Flash over the last few years. It uses too much energy for mobile and has regular security problems. Despite this and the fact it was priced out of my classroom when Adobe bought it I am a little sad that old flash content will either vanish or be hard to view in just a few years.
Google Swiffy looks good, support extends to flash five. Here is a swiffy animation created with Google Swiffy the original flash file, made by my daughter 11 or so years ago when she was in primary school is on the sam page, I can’t tell the difference.
Works on an iPad, Safari, webkit, chrome, firefox on my mac.
I’ve not updated here for a week, but have been quite busy elsewhere.
After reading Neil‘s announcement of teachMeet 08 North, I popped over to the ScotEduBlogs Wiki and started a new page: TeachMeet 08 North for folk to join in the fun. It looks like it is going to be a great event, over 50 edits on the wiki page on the last two days shows a deal of enthusiasm for TeachMeet.
I bumped into Suzie Vesper while following Ewan‘s ULearn07 adventures in NZ on twitter. Suzie hads a great wiki: educational software and web 2.0 which covers nearly everything I’ve heard of. After a few tweets this morning, I’ve started adding an Adobe Flash page to the wiki. Hopefully it will be of some value, the rest of the wiki certainly is.
Coincidentally, I’ve become involved in another flash project; as I was invited to join the Teachers sharing their work with Flash blog.
Teachers sharing their work with Flash centres round the work of Geoff Dellow. Geoff has done an amazing amount of work with flash in schools. He tells me he is retired but he has certainly not slowed down (a quick google will tell a lot). Geoff promotes the use of flash 4 in primary schools and provides free over the phone tutoring for teachers. I first met Geoff at SETT before it was The Scottish Learning Festival. He had children creating animations in flash at his stall which had me hooked.
I hope I manage to do some work with flash again soon so that I can share it on the blog.
http://www.bubbl.us/, flash mind mapping, I’ve spent about 1 minute on it and am convinced it would be useful in school, if we can access it. I wonder if you can create multiple accounts with one email address. if so I might give this a wee try for story planning next week.
dotherightthing.com here is a a Scottish story that will affect my shopping and one discussing if the site is the right thing to do.
I am going to point my bloggers at Sploder and Amazing Circles BETA for a bit of fun soon, I am not sure how long Sploder will be allowed in school but it looks like it would entertain at home. Hopefully using these fun tools will reinforce blogging skills that will be useful with curriculum based tasks.
The costs of trying to maintain a highly ordered system often outweigh the benefits, they say. A messy desk, like Einstein’s, can be “a highly effective prioritising and accessing system”, since it will develop an emergent structure modelled on how your specific mind works, not some externally imposed schema.
A cross between putting my money were my mouth is and enjoying the last couple days of freedom.
Click on the left right hand side of images to advance, the left to go back. The slides sort of explain the hows, whys and wherefores. You can try the editor I hope it will be usable by the children. If not I’ve enjoyed playing with flash.