What?
RSA Animate Style or Common Craft. Out of all the resources I was introduced to in the Computer Using Educators of British Colombia conference, RSA style animation is one I immediately saw the use of. Something that stood out to me with this resource is how it could be used as an excellent presentations tool in the classroom. In brief, RSA style is where you record a birds-eye view of you drawing something while doing a voiceover of the content you are drawing about. An excellent example is the RSA for Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk that can be found at the link at the end of this page. In the session, the instructor went over various examples of RSA style presentations as well as instructions as to how you can produce such a video in the classroom. Finally, she introduced the Common Craft style of video which employs the same concept of filming pictures to coincide with a voiceover dialogue, however it uses cut-outs from magazines or pre-drawn pictures. This allows the students to not worry about actually drawing the picture son camera and could be more suited for lower grades.

So What?
The reason that this method is so effective as a presentation tool for students is that it allows the creative, artist type of student in your classroom to shine. They are still explaining what they’ve learned and their understanding of the subjects, but they are able to use their strengths to present the content. In fact, it deepens the student’s understanding of the concept they are presenting on as it forces them to make further connection from the content to what they are actually going to draw to represent it (aka. high level thinking).

Now What?
Something that stood out to me was how this could be used not only in my future practice, but in my current practicum classroom. On my practicum, my SA is having the students present their knowledge in the form of PowerPoint, Prezi, Powtoons, or other styles to show that they UNDERSTAND the content. This RSA style could be another tool the students could use to present their knowledge and could be attractive to the students who like the design and fun nature of a program such as Powtoons. I will discuss this with my SA next week and hopefully, we can include it in our arsenal of presentation tools.

RSA for Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk: