Introduction

I first became interested in the idea of learning about animation from my daughter. She is eight years old and for Christmas she received a Nintendo DSi. One of her favorite games to play on this is a program called "FlipNote." She has made several animations that include movement and sound. I was very impressed and I thought that other children her age and older would also enjoy using animation as a tool in the classroom. Unfortunately for me, I have a more difficult time learning how to actually create animations than most children. I have a feeling that when I use this in the future my students will far surpass me in knowledge in a very short time.
 * Introduction:**

My first step was to try and find an actual program that I could learn to use, so by looking at Amazon and Googling (is that a word?) I found a program called Anime Studio. It said it was very easy for beginners to use and since I am definitely a beginner I decided to give it a try. I also bought a Bamboo drawing pad for my computer and spent some time learning how to create pictures in Adobe Illustrator with it. I think it is a very helpful tool and I know I will use it a lot in the future. For the following animations I drew the pictures of the rabbit and the digestive system in Adobe Illustrator and then imported them as gif files into Anime Studio. For the text definitions in the Digestive System videos I used Publisher and saved the text as JPEGs. This was one of the problems that I see with Anime Studio. It doesn't allow for paragraphs of text. It is also rather difficult to draw in this program. In the future I might look for an animation program that is a little more detailed when it comes to text and illustrations. Overall, I feel like I learned a lot about animation software and uploading videos onto the internet. Home: