Tag Archives: animation

Textual Animation

GoAnimate Screenshot

I use to really like Xtranormal and in many ways I still do… however though I like Xtranormal and am willing now and again to open the coffers to basically pay to use it, it’s not a tool that I can recommend to practitioners. I will show them, I do like it, but it costs money and it isn’t simple to get a site licence for a site as big as ours and as diverse as ours.

I sometimes find that though I like a particular tool or service, finding a way to allow access for all our staff and learners, on the assumption that only a few would actually use it to begin with, is quite challenging. This isn’t just an issue with small companies such as Xtranormal, but also with software providers as big as Adobe. We now have a site licence for Adobe CS6, in the past we were quite restricted on how we could use other versions of Adobe Creative Suite as it was on a per machine basis.

So what am I recommending now?

Well it’s GoAnimate.

It’s a simple text to animation tool. You choose a setting, choose a couple of characters and then type in the dialogue and then preview the resulting animation. The characters will speak the typed text.

Really by James Clay on GoAnimate

Animated Presentations – Powered by GoAnimate.

It’s a simple way for learners (and staff) to create animations. The limitation of ten lines of dialogue (180 characters per line) can be a constraint, but from a literacy perspective working out a dialogue of text is a good way of improving vocabulary and writing skills.

100 ways to use a VLE – #87 Embedding an Animation


Mention animation to most people and they will think of cartoons. However animation can be used in many different ways to inform, as well as enhance and enrich learning.

This particular animation from CNET shows the history of the iPhone.

You can find similar animations across the web for the whole curriculum. There are also much simpler animations available, these for example show the inner workings of two types of engine.

Animations can often be clearer than videos and of course as with the engine examples they can show stuff in a way a video never could!

You could of course just link to an animation, but the advantage of embedding an animation into the VLE is that you can combine it with text, or questions. A link will take the learner away from the VLE, whereas embedding an animation into the VLE allows you to enhance the animation with extra content or questions that turns the content into a learning activity.