Second graders in Ms. Arnold’s class at Holladay Elementary have been researching famous Americans, and today they created speaking animated characters to share their information. First they drew their famous American in Pixie and typed his or her name. I showed them how to use the 3D brush to make “googly eyes” so their character looked more “cartoonish.” Next we had to make the mouth appear like it was talking. To keep it simple we just added two different mouth shapes. We duplicated the picture and redrew the mouth so that it was in a long shape for making the “ee” sound. Then we duplicated the picture again and redrew the mouth so it was in an O shape for making the “oh” sound. We exported all the pictures as PNG files and saved them to our folders. Next the students went to Voki to create the voice. They clicked the “TTS” button (text to speech) and typed in some factual sentences for their famous American to say about themselves. The fun part was choosing an accent! The students saved their Voki links to their folders as well. That was all we had time for, so it was my job to put the voices together with the drawings. I uploaded the 3 drawings of each character to Glickr in order to make an animated GIF. Then I clicked the link to their Voki. As the GIF and the Voki were playing at the same time I recorded it with Screencast-O-Matic. Take a look at a couple of student examples: Helen Keller by Alana and Susan B. Anthony by Hayden. I uploaded them all to a Google Doc that you can view here.
