I just wanted to show you what one of my students did last year as an experiment with Kinetic Typography. As you know I am always on the hunt for the latest and greatest tech projects for my students as I want their work to be relevant. That's not to say that what is revenant today won't be obsolete tomorrow, but it you can't keep tech projects fresh, then why are we even trying.

So along came kinetic typography. I've been seeing it a lot on YouTube, so I wondered if my middle school students could do it as part of another techttoo. So like I always do, I pull a couple of students aside to make them my guinea pigs to try new things out. And this is what I got.

Pretty cool, huh?

This is why I am going to add it as a techttoo to the middle school technology curriculum that I am developing on this website.

​What do you think?

There is no doubt that animation is taking over education, everything from math to science now uses animations to engage and instruct our students. So it makes sense that our students should know how to animate as a way to show their mastery of a concept. 

In this student example a 4th grader needed a promotional video to get other students (mostly younger students) to give to the charity called KIVA. 

So for this 2D Animation Techttoo, I made tutorials that showed her how to write the script, record the voice-overs, and then how to animate using the available characters. The results speak for themselves.

As I design each techttoo as part of the middle school technology curriculum I try to connect the sample projects to real-world situations, and in most cases I use the charity KIVA.org

It upcoming posts I will explain why this is so important.

The singer/songwriter techttoo is one of the most popular with middle-school students. Here is an example that some 8th graders did. To earn the techttoo they had to write a song about giving money to the charity Kiva.org.

The first step was for them to watch this video about Kiva.org is and then write a song about what they saw in the video. 

The techttoo shows them every step in the songwriting process. ​I had no idea that students could write and perform such amazing songs. Listen to the songs and you'll see why I am now designing my techttoos as middle-school technology curriculum. 

This 8th grader wrote the song and then found the beat on a royalty-free music website, he then used an audio filter to lower his voice to make him sound older and deeper. The results are amazing.

This song is from a different 8th grader, who took a different approach to his song. He then got a high-schooler to record the vocals. The 8th grader performed the guitar. Another great song.