I still remember the first time when I watched the first Flash Animation for chemistry learning at home many years ago. Before that eye opening experiment, I could never imagine testing the chemical equation balancing at home all by myself. Nowadays, technologic advancement has already made the creation of animation using Flash much easier and less expensive. No one could deny the potential benefits that a carefully tailored animation display can bring to our students and those are exactly the long term goals I want to achieve by integrating this technology into my own classroom someday. The animations I create or select will highlight and clarify the difficulties students may encounter and help facilitate their comprehension. At the same time, I hope they can provide students more opportunities for practice even at home and encourage active interactions with me in classroom, with their peers in small groups and with parents.
It is always easier said than done and Figuring out the future time investment to master the technology and prepare to integrate it to actual classroom can be quite difficult. My very first barrier is to ‘overcome your fear of the unknown’ as the Edutopia article points out. There is a long list of learning episodes on Adobe TV and many learning guides are available within the Adobe developer connection and developer forum. Getting started as a beginner to explore these sections will be very demanding and challenging. It may take months for me to master how to use the technology. Besides the time consuming learning process, purchasing the professional software with extra money may also become an obstacle. Additionally, as Moore notes, "You can't do that if teachers are working in isolation behind closed doors.” therefore frequent meeting in small-group and sharing ideas with other ambitious and energetic teachers is also necessary in the future.
One of my goals of utilizing this technology is to simplify the academic contents by displaying kid friendly elements to them directly. Take the example of a Funny Alphabet flash every English teacher may use in the classroom. After attracting students’ attentions, one practice to test their understanding level is to pause the display at an appropriate time and ask them questions about the flash contents. Such as encouraging students to predict which letter or what animal will appear next. After watching the flash animation, I may group them to discuss what they have learnt in order to promote cooperative learning to gauge the effectiveness of the flash animation. Through designing animation, I may also incorporate true/false section in my flash games which build students’ independence as well as get parents involved to track their children’s academic progress. When I add the flash animation to my website, it will be easier for me to measure my goal by viewing their comments and other feedback towards the flash on the web page.
As a teacher, although I may tap various educational flash resources on line, I am inclined to create my own flash animations which will be closely connected with the curriculum and meet students’ actual needs. The desired result will outweigh the effort and time I have invested in integrating the technology into my future classroom. It is indisputable that flash animation will improve educational outcomes and help students of different grades. The presentation of multimedia by flash animation largely improves students’ understanding of their books by simplifying the abstract contents of academic materials. It can be widely used by teachers of different subjects including Language arts, Mathematics, Chemistry, Geography, Music and so on.
Therefore I would like to recommend other teachers to integrate flash animation into their own classrooms no matter what subject and which grade they are teaching. The more teachers use the technology, the more ideas we will share to further improve its implication in our classrooms.