I am a big fan of using animation in class, I find with my class that I get engagement from the children that would normally shy away from presenting their ideas to the class. Tellagami, is a free iOS app that lets you create short animated movies called a “Gami”. This is my favourite animation apps to use. 
Although the site promotes the app as a way to send greetings and messages for use within social media, I feel it is a much more valuable in the classroom.
Getting Started:
Users begin with Tellagami by creating and customising a character. There is some variety in virtual appearance, just enough options exist to personalise your character such as hair or eye colour, skin tone, clothes and even head shape all the way up to huge ‘bobble-head’.
From there, you choose a background either from a few option built into the app itself or you can choose from the camera roll.
Next you can choose how you want your character to talk, either by recording your voice or typing in text. If you record your voice, you have 30 seconds, I’ve found this to be the preferred version of staff and children. Alternatively, you choose text to speech, there are male and female voices with a few different accents.
Some quick ideas you might try:
- History: Character/Famous People Monologues- Children can demonstrate their understanding of a character from a book or period of history by writing and producing a monologue that captures their characteristics.
- Poetry/Spoken word: Recite everything from nursery rhymes to their own creations. App Smash this with iMovie to put together several poems as a class piece of work.
- History/Geography: Take a trip or go back in time and describe where the location/time period
- French, Spanish etc: Share new language skills and phrases from modern foreign languages.
- Writing: Show off pupils’ persuasive skills by highlighting a product, advocating a social issue, this could be a cross-curricular project!
- Maths/ Science: Explain concepts such as how to solve a math problem or ideas in science. Users could make the background as the visual, students can practice speaking skills while demonstrating the ability to explain their thinking.
- Short Stories/Sight Word Stories/Spelling Stories: Have a list of vocabulary or words to know?
- Maths Stories: Practicing addition or subtraction stories? Students can demonstrate reasoning skills here.
When finished, your Gami can be saved to the camera roll, a Gami can then be combined together in iMovie or incorporated into other apps like Explain Everything. Tellagami is a very versatile app, completed Gamis can also be emailed, posted to social media, my preferred method is to get a link code and convert it using an app called Qrafter, I’ll be going over this in a later post.
Thanks for Reading!
Adam Chase (@_geekyteacher)
Diary of a Geeky Teacher 