4th Grade Animated Revolutionary War Heroes

Fourth graders at Trevvett Elementary have been learning about Revolutionary War heroes like Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Jack Jouett, and James Armistead Lafayette (VS.5, VS.6). Students in Ms. Adamonis’ class have each chosen a person to research and have prepared a written speech for the person describing his life and actions. Today we took their speeches and created animated faces using SitePal, so it looks and sounds like the famous heroes are actually talking. First we did a Google image search to find an image of the person. The best images are the ones where the person is facing forward. For people who don’t have a portrait online (like Jack Jouett) we searched for a Revolutionary War era/colonist costume model. Next we uploaded the image to SitePal (click Demo > Classic Demo > 3D > Create Your Own) and followed the directions to mark the eyes, nose, ears, chin, and mouth (this is important for the animation to look realistic). Then we clicked the “Audio” button and chose “TTS” (Text to Speech). We either copied and pasted our speech from our original document or typed it in the box. We chose a voice and an accent, then previewed it to be sure everything sounded correct. SitePal really helps with punctuation and spelling because you can hear right away when something isn’t right. Finally we used Screencastify to record our video and save it to our Google drive. We posted the links to Schoology, but you can take a look at some student projects here.