GoAnimate

Overview
GoAnimate and GoAnimate for Schools and Education are a valuable tool for use in schools. Teachers and students can create animated cartoons and can include their own voice over or a computer generated voice over. Other features include backgrounds available for immediate use or the opportunity to upload your own pictures. With GoAnimate for Schools and Education teachers can complete an unlimited length animation and students can create an animation of up to 2 minutes (GoAnimate, 2010).

Strength
A great tool to reach the younger generation who have grown up with cartoons and video games. With the ability to upload your own voices, music and images and to build your own character students can personalise the animation to be more relevant to them. Easy to use.

Weakness
Some students may not feel comfortable with creating their own cartoon and will need scaffolding or a peer to mentor them until they feel more comfortable.

Opportunity
Students that do not feel comfortable doing an oral presentation can use this tool to complete it either with their voice or a computer generated voice. It will create interest in their presentation and be less threatening. A big opportunity also for students that have speech impairments or who are mute, to be able to communicate without feeling self conscious.

Threat
Students taking an excessive amount of time to complete the task due to them worrying more about how their character looks and acts that the content.

Compatibility to learning styles
A great tool for students with speech impairments or who are mute. Learning styles that would benefit from this tool would include visual, musical and interpersonal.

What learning theory it is most used for (links to this blog site)

GoAnimate can be used for Constructivism or Social Constructivism.

Meaning to me
GoAnimate is a great tool to use in the classroom, care needs to be taken to ensure that instructions are clear so students know what is to be marked and to ensure students create a timeline to monitor their progress. When implementing this tool I would check periodically to ensure students are on track and refocus them on the assessment or task criteria.

GoAnimate. (2010). GoAnimate4Schools: Features. Retrieved 14 December, 2010, from http://goanimate4schools.com/public_features