Crazy Talk, making any image talk!

This week I was introduce to Crazy Talk, an innovative piece of software which transforms any digital image into a talking, animated character bringing them to life with real time puppeteering. you can make it as simple or intricate as you like. You start by uploading a photograph, image or you can use one of the many images already in place. Then by clicking and dragging Certain dots into place the software enhances facial fitting. You can use only four points, which is the basic fitting or you can move up to a more advanced level if desired. Emotion can be added to your actor with emotive one-click mood animations, ideal for beginners or young children, or you can have full control of custom facial for the more advanced. everything becomes animated: eyes, eye brows, lips, nose, cheeks, full head movements... The out comes looked fantastic and I could not wait to have a go. We watched online tutorials to get us started. The first part was fine we chose a bear picture so we could make him into Bertie Bear and add to our Wiki. We uploaded it and and matched up all the points, we used the more advance setting but only because we though we had to. we added teeth and things then recorded a story for our bear to tell. So far so good we thought. It was time to add our facial expressions and head movements. The software automatically added simple mouth movement which we were happy with. We tried to add in the head movements, blinking ect but really struggled. We were starting to get pretty fed up and were thinking this would be no use in the classroom as it was way to difficult and time consuming. Then we realised you can add one click mood animations, perfect. There were lots to choose from and we took the time to to see what many of them looked like. Here is what we came up with.

I love this program as I feel there is so much you can do with it from discussing emotions with young children or autistic children to using a historical character to introduce a topic to bringing children's work to life with an animated character. 

Wikis

Throughout the course of our elective Tamar and I have been working on our collaborative wiki which we have now finished. The focus is healthy living and aimed at the early years level. The purpose of our wiki is to guide the children through the topic, engaging them with different activities from our child friendly environment. The wiki ties in with other areas of our elective such as: our movie, animation, vokis, Crazy Talk ... We did this as we wanted to show our learning within the wiki and for our other activities to have more of a purpose making our learning relevant. We decided to use the character Bertie bear to guide the children through the topic. Bertie is mainly a voki although we do have one version of him we made in Crazy Talk. All of the activities are explained using videos and vokis as we felt this would make it accessible to the early years as they are just starting to read and lots of text would put them off. The use of videos and vokis also means that the activities are not heavily teacher lead allowing children to be responsible for their own learning and provides them with an element of choice. At the bottom of every page we included teacher's notes for quick easy reference of what the page includes. There are also two or three activities which may need teacher involvement and these are highlighted within these notes.

I think that using wikis in this way is a good way to have a topic all in one place, which the children can work through at their own pace, making choices about how they want to move through the topic. To take this further, it could also be shared with the parents creating a stronger home school link and more parental involvement. extension activities could be added depending on the needs of the children. This makes the learning more personal. If the wiki is made private then photos of the children carrying out the activitiea with comments can be added. I feel that the introduction to using wikis at this age would also be beneficial for children's fine motor skills and hand eye coordination. If children were familiar with this level of I.C.T at this age then progression can happen in future years where children can each have an individual page to add to giving them added responsibility, the knowledge to design and create their space and providing them with the feeling of empowerment. There are always concerns when allowing children free rein of a wiki, such as what is to stop one child going on and vandalizing it by erasing content or adding profanities? Richardson (2010 p61) believes, however, that "Giving students editorial control can imbue in them a sense of responsibility and ownership for the site and minimize the risk of someone adding something offensive." I agree with Richardson to a certain extent, but it really depends on the nature of the class. If you think that this could be a problem there are other alternatives out there from wikis that use passwords and logins to software that can be installed on your computer.

Tamar and I found it fairly easy to make our wiki with no major difficulties, but when it came to the layout we found it very temperamental. We wanted our wiki to look perfect and professional but when we organised the layout in edit then viewed it in save it would change the format. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Although this irritated us I do not think it is a problem as the children don't need to strive for the same quality that Tamar and I wanted. Please follow the link to view our wiki.

Tamar and Lyndsay's Healthy Living Wiki