Learning From the Kids

Once again, I find myself learning from my students. Compared to myself, the kids I teach have more exploratory tendencies and are more likely to consider a “what if moment”. I attribute my shortcomings to my advancing age and Ozzy Osbourne.

Students have been researching and writing about the millennium goals in their Geography class. I thought I would introduce them to Xtranormal so they could create another written expression, in the form of an animation, of what they had learned. This could even be used as a summative assessment of their work.

They had to create a script that incorporated a two character interview based on what they had been researching. The animations ranged from an Ali G interview to the Dizzle Show. One student, Saba, showed me how the characters could be given accents. After rendering the animation, instead of the speech being in robotic english it becomes robotic english with a spanish accent.

We wondered, at that point, what would happen if we actually used Spanish instead of English so we started adding Spanish words to the interview. Sounded a lot better in Spanish!! I have created a screencast of part of the process and embedded the final video down below. Might be an interesting way to integrate technology into a world language.

I found the pace of the robotic speech in Spanish very quick so used commas to slow the pace down. I still have to play with this a bit as the dialogue sounds a bit stilted. Some issues with the text and translation as well.