Ready to create an animation that will engage viewers? You may want to take advantage of a new tool from Adobe that makes voice-based animations easy. Let’s explore this new digital tool from Adobe.
First, though, let’s take a quick look at how animations can engage K-12 students. Engagement, while the final destination for learners, ensures you capture student attention.
Flipping Interest Levels
Students may not find the content interesting. Without an engaging story, anecdote, video, or movement-based activity, students ask, “Why?”
Learning something new is often exciting for the learner. Novel experiences cause a rush of dopamine. This not only makes learning seem exciting, but also makes you want to repeat the experience. (source)
To hook student learners into a dopamine stream, you want an engaging activity. Animation can be that activity. Some of the ways animation works best for K-12 students include:
- Ensuring a clear understanding of abstract ideas
- Use of short, attention-grabbing animations to cover specific, relevant content
- Make learning interactive and participatory
- Enable experiential learning
While there are more benefits, this short list demonstrates the value. Let’s take a look at how the free, Adobe Express tool can help.
Introducing Animate Your Voice
This tool makes it easy to:
Make an animated character from your own voice recording using Adobe Express.
There are only three simple steps:
- Choose a character from those available.
- Upload your audio file or record your dialogue.
- Preview the audio and animation, making changes to the character or background as you see fit.
- Save or share your animation with others.
Let’s take a look at each of these steps in turn. Ready? Let’s go.
Step 1: Choose a Character
As you can see from the image above, there are ample choices of characters. Choose from any of those available, and see them appear center screen.
For fun, I chose a character resembling me and decided to upload the audio I recorded. That’s an option available in addition to recording your audio via the website.
It was the beginning of a free story I found at Kids Love To Know. The story is that of “Captain Silverhook’s Symbol of Strength” (PDF). You can save it to your device or read it online for free.
Here’s a little information about it:
Captain Silverhook’s Symbol of Strength is a 600-word short story. It is suitable for children of all ages. Kids in second grade or higher may be able to read the story on their own. The story is about a pirate with a problem to solve. Captain Silverhook must replace his ship’s destroyed, nautical figurehead. That’s the shape carved on the front of his ship. He must come up with a new design before he loses the respect of the other pirates.
Using Audacity, a free open-source audio editor. I read the first paragraph of the story with a little flair:
Then, I uploaded the audio file for processing to Adobe Express’ Animate Your Voice site:
You can see the finished product below:
Step 2: Preview the Animation
You can make changes to the animation you’ve recorded, cropping the audio as needed. It’s not too difficult, and you can bring this process to a close if you’ve done your editing in Audacity or a similar tool, which I recommend.
Step 3: Save or Share Your Animation with Others
Click the Download button, and if you aren’t logged in with your free account, you will need to create an account. The process is easy if you use Google Authentication (which I did). Adobe offers access to other authentication schemes, so creating an account isn’t hard.
To share your animation, you will save an MP4 video formatted version. You can watch my creation below:
Once you’re done saving video to your device, Adobe will prompt you to buy their $54.99 Creative Cloud All Apps plan which includes Character Animator.
Final Reflections
Animate Your Voice is an easy-to-use tool, and I can definitely see my third-grade students and older students using it. Give it a go!
As with any tool, the strength of the learning that results comes from how much thought students have to put into it in the first place. So they should definitely be asked to storyboard their cartoon first and have it peer edited for clarity, flow, and understanding. The app encourages students to use “Story Arcs” in planning their masterpiece. According to the website, “A Story Arc is a scaffolding tool that helps you map out a story’s plot. Whether they’re learning Language Arts or Science, kids can practice communication skills using story arcs as formulas for convincing arguments.”