Technology Effectiveness
I felt it was important to put a very "visual" tutorial together to teach basic animation, because this is a very visual medium and one that, in my opinion, needs a lot of screen captures of what the process looks like in order to fully understand it.
Many of the tutorial books available for such programs as Animation Shop or for vector-based drawing programs, such as Adobe Illustrator, are written for an adult audience, and often, an adult audience who has worked with the drawing program before. (Very few of the books I've used over the years have been "basic" enough for the raw, newbie beginner. I had to go to the web to find very basic help in order to have enough knowledge to use the books.)
Danial Callison says, in his book "The Blue Book on Information Age Inquiry, Instruction, and Literacy," that "As a tool, technologies can help make some aspects of the inquiry process more manageble or efficient. Information can be accessed faster.[...] While the teacher may master some aspects of instructional design through the latest evolution of hypermedia, the more powerful strategy is the technology in the hands of the learner."
Through this tutorial, I hoped to put the technology, as Mr. Callison suggests, into the hands of the learner.
Technical Issues
I have tried to address, through this tutorial, the best way to create an animated movie. In doing so, I've used digital photographs, animated gifs (which are a form of video), and Google Page Creator, as well as creating .html pages using Word 2007.
There are issues involved in these forms of presentation.
1. Digital photographs really can't tell a student if his/her drawing is going to work for animating. Some drawings will be too complex, others, too simple. Input from an art teacher will be very helpful in providing guidance to students if they need help in this area.
2. Vector -based drawing programs are difficult, at best, to learn to use. The tutorials I created using Word 2007 and my own screen captures are, I hope, a help in this area, but I realize that even with all I've provided, understanding a program like Inkscape might be a murky prospect.
3. Students may or may not really understand the animation process. Again, input from an art teacher would be very helpful here. I've tried to help this situation a bit by providing links on the first "Easy Animation" page to address this issue.
Problems with the Software Involved
The software used in this animation project are all good programs. However, there are some possible frustrations to each and every one of them.
1. Inkscape: While this program is free, it is not easy to use, and the layer concept, which we rely on to draw our spider, is one that not all people readily grasp.
Also, in creating our animation, students must create a number of .svg files (Which are the Inkscape drawing files) as well as export all these files to .png, or bitmap format. While Inkscape usually keeps track of which file name it is exporting, occasionally it doesn't, and without being careful to to check this, you might over-write one of your earlier files.
2. Jasc: Okay, so when I started this project, I wasn't aware that Jasc had been purchased by Corel. Jasc used to offer their Animation Shop as a free trial. Corel may do so, but it must be a part of one of their other packages. I was not going to go hunting for it to figure that out. I also do not know if my Jasc version will operate in the same way as the newer Corel package. Hopefully, my tutorial is close. If you want the Jasc package, find it on ebay or Amazon.com. The Jasc Animation Shop was included with Jasc PaintShop Pro version 8.
3. Animation Shop and Animated Gifs: While I was working with Animation Shop, I noticed an odd problem with saving to animated GIF. After saving one or two gif files, my computer, which is very new and loaded to the gills with extra memory and such, told me that it was out of memory, and I could not save my GIF. The solution was to make sure I had saved my file in Animation Shop format, close it out, open it back up and try the save again. This appeared to fix the problem every time. It's like Animation Shop, in saving to GIF, takes up a large portion of your computer's memory and doesn't give it back.
Source:
Callison, D., & Preddy, L. (2006). The blue book on information age inquiry, instruction, and literacy. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited.