Creating a flash

I was just getting very bored with all the glogster, prezi, google maps, PowerPoint when my course activity mentioned "Animation". I have tried doing flash a few times but as I did not need to make anything I always just started and then left it - its hard! So when I read animation I knew my time had come to create a flash.

My son had been discussing the concept of BODMAS in the car from school so that became my topic. I found the exercise to be challenging nearly to the point of giving up, but my perseverance paid off and my flash is in the previous post to this blog. As a tool for learning this bit of flash would have to be extended somewhat and is only meant to illustrate what can be done. Creating this flash had loads of higher order thinking (Clark, 1999) - mostly creating.

I experienced the following:

• Visual design - this was required to decide whether a element should start from the top, left, right grow shrink, taking a blank space and doing something with it.
• Problem solving - I had finished what I was aiming to do for this exercise and then decided to test the movie, it did not work. I had to go back through everything I had done to find the problem. The next bit of problem solving was to publish the flash to my blog. It was not going to be a quick attach a file. Two hours later and a few e-mails later the flash is published. 
• Mathematical concepts - space and measurement, x y axis, rotation angles.

Students can use animations to create their own games that they can publish on the web (good luck to them, just putting it on a blog was hard enough).  Facilitators can use flash to spice up a boring subject.

Although flash may not be something that everybody would use to do their work, I do feel that this is something that will engage the 21st century student, and me a mere digital immigrant!


References

Clark, D. R. (1999, June 5). Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains. Retrieved March 10, 2011, from Big Dog & Little Dog's Performance Juxtaposit: http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html#cognitive