Introduction
- Many of the students in the Computer Skills for ESL class (which some of us were taking and some of us were teaching) enjoyed experimenting with PowerPoint animation, usually applied to very short texts such as proverbs, haiku, or other short poetry.
- In presentations, fancy animation effects can be distracting, but
in little standalone "micro movies," animation can be a lot of fun, and working with it may have additional benefits.
Benefits
- It promotes a deeper (or at least a different kind of) engagement with short texts. Students think carefully about the meaning and mood of the text and how that can be represented by motion.
- Using the animation effects interface provides lots of practice with high-frequency vocabulary related to direction, duration, and movement.
- Students get an introduction to basic concepts of computer animation.
Four basic kinds
of animation effect
- Entrance effects bring things onto the screen.
- Emphasis effects change the appearance of things already on the screen.
- Motion effects move things from one place to another on the screen. They can also move things on or off the screen.
- Exit effects take things off of the screen.
Introducing
animation to a class
- Before working with animation, do at least a project or two where PowerPoint is being used as intended: as support for a speaker.
- Start with a simple animation project where the whole class does the same thing.
- Next, do a project where everyone starts together, but then there is plenty of space for customization through the replacement of images or text.
- Direct students interested in further exploration towards additional resources they can study on their own. Or just let them play around with the interface and give help when needed.
Demo project
The following are some important concepts I hope you will glean from the demo project we will be doing together. They are listed in more or less the order I would suggest introducing them to a class.
The following are some important concepts I hope you will glean from the demo project we will be doing together. They are listed in more or less the order I would suggest introducing them to a class.
- Applying an animation effect
- Using "Effect Options" to adjust an effect
- Setting an effect to begin "with previous," "after previous," or "on click"
- Adjusting duration of an effect
- Adjusting order in which effects occur
- Applying more than one animation effect to the same object
I recommend keeping the text down to 20 words or less. The
following can be good resources.
Proverbs/sayings
http://www.learn-english-today.com/proverbs/proverbs.html
(list of many hundreds)
Haiku
http://www.toyomasu.com/haiku/
(This is a long article that might be interesting for advanced students.)
http://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-proverbs.html
(a fascinating list of Native American sayings)
"How-to"
webpages
These are the two best instructional webpages I have found.
- http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19105/how-to-animate-text-and-objects-in-powerpoint-2010/
- https://support.office.com/en-ca/article/Animate-text-or-objects-305a1c94-83b1-4778-8df5-fcf7a9b7b7c6
"How-to"
videos
- A good introductory video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iggpwwRpTiQ
- A good introduction to creating multiple effects that occur simultaneously (though the narration is, unfortunately, very fast): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1ew_Gzuo50
- A more advanced video showing how to combine animations in sequence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MHWewMyUZI
Converting to
video for YouTube
The procedure described on the following page will turn an
animated slide into video that can be uploaded to YouTube. Be sure that all
animations are set to run automatically, i.e. everything is either set to
"start with previous" or "start after previous" and nothing
is set to "start on click." Set "seconds to spend on each line"
to the total length of your animation plus a second or two.
