What it is: DomoNation is a free animation website that is powered by Go! Animate. The site is very intuitive to use and makes impressive cartoon animations. Students can create animations with backdrops, characters, dialogue, props, music, and special effects. Students can create on scene or several to make up their animation. The interface is very simple to learn, the drag and drop platform will be familiar to students. To make their cartoon come to life, each character has a set of actions and emotions that can be added by clicking on the character and choosing from a drop down menu. Special effects, such as weather occurrences or zooming, are simple to add to the project. Animations can be saved for personal or public view on the DomoNation site. This is an impressive little web application that makes students the director of their very own movie.
How to integrate DomoNation into the classroom: Allow students to present their knowledge creatively using DomoNation instead of requiring the traditional report, diorama, or poster plastered with pictures and information. Students can create an impressive alternative book report by creating an animated book talk, interviewing a character from the story, or re-creating an important scene in the story. Students can display their knowledge about a historical figure by “interviewing” the historical person of interest or an eye-witness of a historical event. DomoNation would be a great platform for creating public service announcements (how about the importance of hand washing with the H1N1 outbreak?) or short video commercials that persuade in a debate. Students can write a screen play and then transform it into an animation. Animations are also a great way to illustrate vocabulary words and story problems in math. In the foreign language classroom, students can create short cartoons practicing the new vocabulary they are learning. The possibilities are endless! Hold a DomoNation premier party day in your classroom so that students can watch each other’s finished animations and learn from their peers.
Tips: Direct your students to the Create page of DomoNation, some of the content created by other users may not be appropriate for your school.
Related Resources: Kerpoof, Shidonni, XtraNormal, DoInk
Leave a comment and tell us how you are using DomoNation in your classroom.
Domo Go Animate is great. My Grade 5 and 6 students have been experimenting with the features over the last week, and will be beginning to use it as a book report tool.
We will display the finished products on our blog http://missmyerss7.edublogs.org
A similar website that is fantastic is http://www.xtranormal.com, which allows the kids to type conversations between characters while animating their presentation. My kids looovvveee it, and are always desperate to go onto it!
Laura