GoAnimate!

I have begun using GoAnimate! in my Psychology 20 class for student assignments.  I have just come off of a summer of blogging about online tools that can be used in the classroom for my ETAD 800 class.  I stumbled upon GoAnimate! at the end of my course and didn't get around to creating a blog on it at that time.  Since finding GoAnimate! I have incorporated it into my Psychology 20 online course where each week the students are given a situation with a client and they are to give a 10 line dialogue with the client and the given Psychologist.  Week one was with Freud and I was so impressed with the animations.

Below is a sample students work.

GoAnimate.com: Psychology Project 1: Freud by Student234

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!



In order to get full marks for the animation they have to use at least three different theories or techniques from the psychologist that showed that they had a comprehensive understanding of the psychologist.  Of course, as with any class the quality of the animations varied.  Some of the animations just highlighted Freud offering the client cocaine, which he certainly did in his career, but there is more to Freud than that. 

In any case I found that this assignment offered the students a creative outlet for which to show what they know about each psychologist or theory.  The assignments are a joy to mark and are much less mundane than another paper assignment.

In order to use GoAnimate! each of the students has to sign up for their own GoAnimate! account and once they create their animation they are to embed their animation onto their class blog.  At the time that I created my GoAnimate! class I also signed up for the free GoAnimate4schools account.  This would allow you to create a class for your students and sign up your students so that they didn't need an account to sign in.  The limitations for what I wanted my students to do was that the students could not share or embed their video outside of the school account.  This would likely be a good feature if you were looking for added security for elementary aged students, but since I needed my high school students to embed their animations on their class blog, GoAnimate4Schools was too limiting for me.  I have noticed that since I signed up for the free GoAnimate4Schools they have since removed the free version and have rather lowered their subscription for the full GoAnimate4Schools package.  In any case for me the regular free version was good enough for what I needed.

If you have other scenarios where you have used GoAnimate! in the classroom please add them to the comments section!