Crazy Talk takes two main elements of animation production, facial expressions and lip-sync, and makes them exceptionally easy to achieve. The benefits of this for teaching students are that they can draw a face, write a first person story, record it and within ten minutes produce an animation of their drawn face. The results can stand alone as a teaching aid to engage students in writing and communicating or can be incorporated into a larger project for instance in getting characters from history to talk in a video.  

Today I was delighted to be invited to the launch of www.localcommittedublin1and7.net which DISC had a small part in helping to create by providing Local Committee members with training in web design. The result is a very comprehensive resource for parents and those working with children in Dublin 1 and 7. They are hoping to translate the website into different languages for the many immigrants in the area so if anyone feels they could help please contact them.  Congratulations to everyone involved in the project.

I have managed to get invited into 2 schools so far to demonstrate Classblogmeister. The response has been very positive on the day but it remains to be seen whether the blogs are updated regularly. I do tell everyone they don’t have to write much; just a few sentences about what has been done during the week. As I am in constantly preaching about the benefits of classroom blogging to the teachers in DISC schools I guess I should put a little of it into practice. So I will do my best to add an article regularly as I encourage the teachers to do.

This video was made by children in Gardiner Street National School, Dublin. The teacher was Deirdre O'Dwyer.

The DISC Project was established in 1998 with the aim of achieving equality of access, opportunity and training to Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) across Dublin inner-city disadvantaged schools. DISC is part of the Dublin Institute of Technology Community Links Programme. In order to achieve this aim a co-ordinated and structured programme for the upgrade of inner-city disadvantaged primary and post-primary schools was put in place. Relevant teacher training programmes developed and implemented and the DISC ICT Projects Initiative established.

My specific job is to assist teachers with computer projects in the classroom. The projects we promote include comic making, animation (clay, table top and Crazy Talk), video making, computer game making, lego robotics, 3d design using SketchUp and hopefully classroom blogging once I get to grips with classblogmeister.