Week Seven - Crazy Talk

This week Collette introduced us to a prgramme called Crazy Talk.
This is a programme which allows you to use either a picture of your choice or one of the pictures already on the programme and create your own animation. The programme allows you to record add voice to your character or photo, use an automated text-to-voice function, use the different functions to allow the mouth of your character to move when talking and chose a mood for your character (which will change the facial expressions).

To begin with, I found the programme quite difficult to make sense of as there were so many different controls to make your character do dfferent things. However, Collette pointed us in the right direction and we were able to watch some different Youtube videos giving step-by-step guides of what to do.

The following videos can help with the basic face fitting and creating a script:






First of all, to practice we made an animation which we could use on our Wikispace regarding the importance of exercise in staying healthy.
We choose the athlete, Kelly Holmes, and she tells us a bit about herself and the importance of exercise. As you can see, her mouth is moving when she speaks:




We then created an animation which links to a Curriculum for Excellence experience and outcome.

As I listen or watch, I can make notes, organise these under suitable headings and use these to understand ideas and information and create new texts, using my own words as appropriate.  LIT 2-05

The following animation created by Mandy and I, features the pirate, Blackbeard.
It is an example of how Crazy Talk could be used in the primary classroom: as part of a language task, the children are being given instructions from Blackbeard.

With our video, the class teacher would have to pause it as the correct points, for example, when certain questions are asked before the piece of text is read to the children. The children have been learning about verbs and adjectives and their task is to listen to the piece of text and using their worksheet, identify the verbs and adjectives and put them under the correct headings in the table.

As an additonal task, the children would then use come up with words with a similar meaning to those in their table (using a thesaurus if necessary).

The video below is simply an example of the kind of thing which could be used with a class. We have used the automated voice, however, if we were creating this to use with a class, we would have recorded our own speech.




In my opinion, using a programme such as Crazy Talk could bring benefits to your classroom - it can add that little bit of excitement needed in a lesson to keep the children motivated. Using a tool like this would be much more effective than you as the teacher simply reading out a piece of text. It should, however, be used selectively as not only is it very time consuming but it is important to get the balance right regarding just how much technology you use in the classroom to replace you as the teacher.

I am still in two minds about allowing the children to use this programme as it can be very confusing and time consuimg.