6 Great Sites and Apps for Student Animation

Student animation is one of the most exciting advances in education technology, allowing students the opportunity to be endlessly creative in designing their own comic strips, movies and more. Whether it’s using stop-motion animation to create amazing stories, Minecraft to recreate scenes or simply a pen and paper, animation is a fantastic way to liven up the classroom and is guaranteed to be a big hit with young and older students alike.

With the advent of this plethora of great new sites and apps, art and drawing are no longer only for the art class – they can be brought to bear on almost any subject and can be particularly useful for lightening otherwise dry topic material. You can make a cartoon or an animation out of any topic, from creating your own animated version of a Shakespeare play to a virtual model of ionic and covalent chemical bonding! Best of all, the excitement of creating their own project is guaranteed to animate (sorry couldn’t resist!) your students no matter what the subject matter.

Sites and Apps for Student Animation

1. Toontastic (Personal & School Edition)

“With over 7 million cartoons created in 200+ countries, parents and teachers rave about this app… and kids can’t stop creating!” iTunes – App Store Hall of Fame and NY Times – Top 10 iPad Apps.

Definitely one of the most well put together tools for creating student animation, Toontastic lets kids create some pretty impressive stuff with very little effort. By just dragging characters and objects around the screen with their finger, kids can animate just about anything. It’s a long way from creating a frame by frame flipbook or animation, but it does mean kids can create a lot in a small amount of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeUWYd0NEZM

2. GoAnimate

GoAnimate is considered the most popular animation website and is by far the most professional. Known as the fastest, easiest way to make a video, GoAnimate is used by businesses, schools and individuals to create slick and stylish animations. With video templates and easy character creation, the site is perfect for young students venturing into animation all the way up to seniors and professionals looking for a fun way to present ideas. It is free to sign up to GoAnimate and discounts are offered for education purposes. Features for schools include: private and secure environment, school-safe content, content moderation and group management.

3. DoInk (iPad & iPhone)

DoInk is a slightly more sophisticated platform ideal for older students who want to add more detail and extra features such as text into their projects. The option to use community art and templates means that this would be a great program to use for an animation project where you want to start students off with a uniform template such as a background or initial diagram and then encourage them to add their own features.

DoInk was originally a site based animation tool but is now only available as an iPad/iPhone/iPod app.

4. Flipbook

The brilliant thing about Flipbook is its absolute simplicity – you can get started without a moment’s delay as soon as you enter the website – no need even to download Java. The platform is brilliantly simply designed – on each page of your flipbook you simply select your brush size and colour then create the image to your own satisfaction. Turning to the next page your initial image appears faded in the background to enable you to work from it when drawing the next image in your book, making it easy for even quite young kids to make successful books whose pictures change slowly from one position to the next. A fantastic resource for using with groups, for example in a BYOD (bring your own device) setting, as teams of students could create flipbooks together by taking it in turns to illustrate one page each at a time. The finished products give a real sense of satisfaction and make a great group-viewing session at the end.

5. Adobe Creative Cloud Student – Teacher Edition

When you are ready to step up to a full-blown suite of artistic tools for animation, you need to look at Adobe’s Creative Cloud.

Adobe’s Creative Cloud isn’t free, but does come at a significant price discount for both teachers and students.  It’s also the gold standard for online design and drawing.  Learning to use Creative Cloud effectively is a life skill that will benefit any up-and-coming digital artist for the rest of their lives.

6. Zimmer Twins

This is a great platform for students to make a simple animated movie. The tools are relatively simple to use but there is a lot of choice so this is perfect for mid-level students. Particularly useful for animations where the focus will be on characters – whether recreating a novel or producing their own play or sitcom – as it allows the option to choose from details such as facial expressions and human activities such as talking on a phone or using a loud speaker, as well as actions like thinking and whispering.

Do you use animation sites in the classroom? Let us know which ones you find most successful for student animation and share your recommendations below!

1st image courtesy of Flickr, vancouverfilmschool. 2nd image courtesy of Flickr, Nestor Alonso.