This afternoon, I drove down to Ocala, Florida to visit Karin Gunn’s classroom at West Port High School. Karin teaches photography and digital animation at West Port and is the author of the Teach Animation website. While there, I introduced the Rotoball project to Karin’s animation classes and arranged to have David Gran, who originally developed the Rotoball project, speak to the students via Skype.
David teaches art and technology at the Shanghai American School in China and is the primary author of The Carrot Revolution blog. The Rotoball project, which 11 schools from around the globe participated in last year, requires each participant to contribute a 15-second rotoscoped animation clip of themselves interacting with a black ball that enters from the left side of the screen and exits on the right side of the screen. What happens within the 15-second segment is up to each animator.
Given the 12-hour difference between Ocala and Shanghai, a HUGE THANKS goes out to David for getting up in the middle of the night and speaking to Karin’s students for 40 minutes. I know I wouldn’t be nearly as pleasant and coherent as David was in talking and answering students’ questions, if someone woke me at 2:30 in the morning, sat me in front of a computer, and expected me to talk.
Besides admiring David’s generosity, I was pleased that the Skype connection to China worked so well. I would definitely recommend that art teachers add Skype to their digital toolbox as a means of bringing guest speakers from distant places into their classrooms, and connecting their classrooms to other classrooms around the globe.
