Explanatory Animations in the Classroom

Dr Brendan Jacobs spent most of his career in primary school classrooms before publishing an early example of a multimodal PhD dissertation through the University of Melbourne. Since entering academia, he has published widely in journals and spoken at various international conferences on learning and technology. Brendan works in teacher education as a lecturer at the Mackay City campus of CQUniversity Australia.

This book provides groundbreaking evidence demonstrating how student-authored explanatory animations can embody and document learning as an exciting new development within digital pedagogy.  Explanatory animations can be an excellent resource for teaching and learning but there has been an underlying assumption that students are predominately viewers rather than animation authors.  The methodology detailed in this book reverses this scenario by putting students in the driver's seat of their own learning. This signals not just a change in perspective, but a complete change in activity that, to continue the analogy, will forever change the conversation and make redundant phrases like "Are we there yet?" and "How much longer?"  The digital nature of such practices provides compelling evidence for reconceptualising explanatory animation creation as a pedagogical activity that generates multimodal assessment data. Tying together related themes to advance approaches to evidence-based assessment using digital technologies, this book is intended for educators at any stage of their journey, including pre-service teachers.

Reports on groundbreaking research into explanatory animation creation

1 Introduction: Learning from the Driver's Seat.- 2 Theoretical Framework.- 3 Methodology and the Explanatory Animation Framework (EAF).- 4 Insights from the Reverse engineering Explanatory Animation Learning Method (REALM).