Encouraging young students to express their thoughts and ideas in a creative and innovative way is an important task of K-12 teachers, especially primary school teachers. Kids explore and learn in an amazingly fast speed if they are facilitated to do so. One of the tools that can really empower young learners’ creativity and innovation is Zimmer Twins, tool for creating one’s own digital story.
Description:
Zimmer Twins is a site devoted to kids who want to
create and share their animated digital story. The Zimmer Twins is the
brainchild of Jason Krogh, founder of Zinc Roe design. Jason set out a tool
that allowed kids to use their imagination and exercise their storytelling
powers. Jason teamed up with director Aaron Leighton, who developed the
characters and designed the visual styles for the stories.
The Zimmer Twins was launched in 2005 and selected
movies from the TELETOON site. Their next partners were ABC in Australia, and
qubo/NBC in the U.S.
The unique feature of the Zimmer Twins format is it
combines online participants with broadcast delivery. Children are invited to
create and share up to 1 minute movie using a story editor and a library of
animation. Kids tell their stories by choosing actions, characters, and
background for each of the scene. The scene can be inserted, deleted or its
order can be altered in the series. They can also add their own dialogue and
on-screen texts. New clips can be added, or removed from an existing one.
Additional
download/ installation/skills
No downloads or additional installation is needed in
order to use Zimmer Twins. As many other Web 2.0 Tools, users (kids from 8-17
or adults) would need an account. Their usernames will be displayed on the
story when it’s broadcasted.
No specific skills are required in order to use this
tool.
And here is the most simple movie that I created
using 3 types of animation. http://zimmertwinsatschool.com/node/103841
Application
scenario
I believe there’s a wide range of instructional
applications of Zimmer Twins, just as digital storytelling can be applied to
various teaching subjects. Story creating on Zimmber Twins seems simple, but
requires and allows a lot of creativity, and thus autonomy, imagination and
independent thinking from the students on the go.
I would use this tool in a Basic English language
class. A snapshot example would be in a basic grammar class about tense in
English in integration to conversational or narrative writing. Teachers can ask
students to create a 1 minute story of what they dreamed the night before,
including dialogues of the characters in their dreams (if teaching Simple Past
Tense), or a most unrealistic thing that they can imagine (teaching
Unconditional Sentences), etc, for example.
Would
I recommend this tool?
Absolutely!
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