Toontastic 3D Animated Videos

At my recent staff retreat which was held at the Resorts World Sentosa Convention Centre, my principal weaved the day's activities into the theme of Pirate Adventures after being inspired by the book Lead Like a Pirate : Make School Amazing for Your Students and Staff . She also mentioned how there would be plans to ramp up the New Media Literacy programmes in the school as we hope to develop T-shaped students with the breadth and depth in Skills, Knowledge, Attitudes and Values (SKAV).

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My principal also intrigued me when she spoke of the Pirate's dilemma which was a play at the Prisoner's dilemma and the economist in me perked up. It definitely got my attention. That was why when the opportunity arose to do something with it came, I took it right away.

One of the activities after the lunch break was to come up with a skit about how Pirates-Teachers should lead. We had to work together as a table of 10 to come up with something although it was optional. However, just before lunch I started to think about some different ways to do it and I recalled an Android app I downloaded from Google when I was searching for the Google Assistant apps which I wrote about previously.

"ACTION! With Toontastic 3D you can draw, animate, and narrate your own cartoons. It's as easy as play..." according to the Google Play Store. 

The storytelling app for kids had ready made characters and scenes which suited the Pirate Adventure theme and it was pretty user-friendly too. At the click of a few buttons and after dragging and dropping the various characters with the flow of the 'Pirate's Dilemma' idea mentioned earlier, I was able to come up with a rough draft.

We then narrated the story and added sound effects live as part of our presentation. In actual fact, the app allows easy addition of recorded voice and even a variety of background music to choose from. When doing up the video, I realised that it was a really useful tool for students to tell their stories.

 choose one of the three templates for the flow of the video 

a useful feature to add polls into videos

Watch the video above which I created in less than 3 minutes for the purpose of the 2 minutes performance segment. Surprisingly, the teachers in the audience were pretty impressed. They thought that it was a video that was already made and available online somewhere and that we just made use of it for our purposes. Our team got some little gifts for the little performance and I did my part for the team in that sense.

To top it all of, I received an Outstanding Contribution Award from the school for my contributions in leveraging ICT in my Teaching and Learning as the Maths ICT Champion. I suppose all the hard work I put in with the VIA and the moderation of dialogues/panels also helped. This marks a good end to a pretty long and enduring year before my school duties officially ends on the Open House Day.