Assignment 8 - Fuzzwich, Animation for Everyone!

Description of Assignment 8:

   Create your animation by Fuzzwich.

    

   Below is the animation I created for learning the word "hungry" and the phrase "follow me". English beginner could know the meaning of the phrase with the angel's action, and memorize the word, which appear twice in this context.

Just as it is declared on the website, Fuzzwich provides a platform for everyone to create self animation. Just follow those simple steps on the screen, everybody could create the very own animated masterpiece in moments.

There are several templetes of background for animation, also you can upload your own background by clicking on "upload"; and then choose the roles you like in Fuzzwich. One of the features in Fuzzwich is that you could use your own photo to instead the faces of your role! That is really funny! (Suppose that your handsome/beautiful face with a pirate/evil body!) Then, you can edit of the appearance of roles' faces (smile, sad, etc.),and set the dialogue of those roles. Another feature in Fuzzwich is that it is easy to set the role's moving trace. When you click on the "record" button, just drag the roles on the screen to draw the trace of moving. When stop, you can preview the animation.

Fuzzwich assignment is the last assignment in IT644, which is also the easiest one for learn. But, it is really very interesting and useful. Before getting know about Fuzzwich, creating animation is so mysterious a thing for me. And I believe  the similiar feeling would be for most people who are not good at designning or flash. The platform that Fuzzwich provides for us is a creative place for everyone, especially for those who want to use animation for instruction but without any knowledge about animation.

In language teaching, context is a thing that playing very important role for language acquisition. A good and proper context could help learners to learn language much more efficiently and leave learners more impression on the words or phrases that appear in the context. Fuzzwich could just do this. Trying to create a simple dialogue between two roles in the animation, with music and funny background, teacher could make their classroom much more attractive.

I would like to give an comprison here. Suppose that,  teacher would like to teach beginner of English what to say or how to say "hi" for the first time between two strangers. There could be several methods to accomplish this teaching stragtedy.

    Method 1: The most traditional way maybe tell learners orally, "when strangers meet each other for the    first time, you have to say "how are you?" or "How do you do"", and then the teacher would write down those two phrases for students.

    Comment: This method is direct, students can understand what should be used for the first time meeting. But the obvious disadavantage of this method is that it is too boring, and students needs more time to memorize the two phrases. They know what to do, but they do not know how to do!

   

     Method 2: Based on the first method, teachers may do some improvement. Some of the teachers would choose to draw pictures for the sceen, (on blackboard, or on hand-out paper). And then, teacher could tell students, how to use the phrases to say hi to strangers.

     Comment: This method is much better than the most traditional one, which does provide the sceen for language learning, to certain content, it could be recognized as "context". But, this kind of "context" is limited, it is only on the picture, which means that it is dead, not "live". It still cannot activate the learning atomosphere in class. Language is a living thing, how could it only exit on paper conveying to learners?

     Method 3: Fuzzwich could make language learning and teaching vivid. Teacher can create a simple animation to show two strangers meet for the first time to say hi to each other, with music or different background (for example, on the beach, in the street, etc. That is really life!). To check whether learners understand the phrases and make sure that learners know how to use the phrases, teachers could give the chance for learners, asking whom to create a similiar screen by Fuzzwich.

     Comment: Fuzzwich creates a vivid language learning context successfully, and this is a also the feedback part of  language learning procedure, which really crucial for language learning! It bring the language teaching and learning from a 2-dimension (word, and paper) to 3-dimension (word, paper, and really context). That is just what I need in my English teaching class!