GoAnimate.com: Underdog and the Perilous Flight by mikebogle

Kudos to my colleague, Mark Foster, for discovering this absolute gem of a service. GoAnimate is a site that enables you to easily create your own cartoons and animations, using your own story lines, transitions, speech bubbles and sound effects.

I’ve only just scratched the surface on this tool, so there is a whole lot I don’t know. However having spent an hour or so experimenting with the toolset, and creating the above cartoon, I can happily say that GoAnimate is easy to use and yet lets you produce pretty impressive looking results.

Certainly there is the entertainment element to this service, however I also see a great deal of potential for educational value as well. The Common Craft Show has shown us that hand-drawn explanations – completely devoid of a single on-screen pixel – can be used to effectively explain social media concepts. I think GoAnimate could do much the same.

Think of Dudley Do-Right debating open education with Snidely Whiplash, or Spiderman introducing networked learning and Connectivism. Quite seriously I think it could add an entertaining, and thus really engaging, element to the mix.

I’m hoping that there will be a way to download the cartoons you create, and/or upload them to your YouTube account – because I prefer to keep all my digital media stored more or less in the same place. Ultimately the full reality of the service will present itself as I continue to experiment.