My Place Your Place Workshop

Learn how to make a digital story about your favourite place.

With Kahootz 3 software, children create 3D animations incorporating characters, animals, worlds and sound effects.

The workshop uses My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins and My Place TV series as stimulus for ideas. ACTF education team and animator Terry Oberg leads the workshops.

Things to try

• Talk about your favourite place; inside or out-of-doors
• Brainstorm what the word 'animation' means
• Play a few minutes of a cartoon or an animation with the sound turned off. How do the pictures alone tell the story
• Introduce some film-making vocabulary into your conversations such as 'zoom in' and 'zoom out', long (or wide) shot, medium shot, close up (Use Wikipedia to assist with definitions)

Visit Australian Children's Television Foundation and Kahootz.

Books to read

• My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins

Meet the Artists

Terry Oberg

Terry Oberg has taught in the Animation program at the Southbank Institute of Technology for the past ten years. He has a passion for animation, storytelling, multimedia technologies, drawing and teaching.

Terry was awarded the Southbank Institute of Technology's Outstanding Educator of the Year award in 2009, and is a qualified secondary and tertiary teacher. He has been employed as an artist-in-residence at a variety of primary and secondary schools, helping younger students to create animated films using Kahootz and Flash software. His involvement in the 2008 edition of Out of the Box saw him working with two classes of extraordinarily talented primary school students from Macgregor and Holland Park, and running a series of hour-long workshops at the festival.

Terry has made several short films over the years, including Waterwise, the winner of the Best Animated Film category in the 2008 Liquid Lens Film Festival. In addition to his animation and teaching work, he has been a book reviewer for The Courier-Mail since 2000.

Deborah Cohen

Deborah is responsible for the development of the ACTF's educational resource packages and the Learning Centre materials. She has many years experience in education as a teacher and as a curriculum officer; writing and developing education resources, providing professional development and curriculum implementation.

Students use Kahootz 3 to create 3D digital stories with animated characters, animals, worlds, and sound effects. Use the book My Place by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins and My Place TV series as stimulus texts prior to the workshop. ACTF education team and animator Terry Oberg lead the workshops.
Ages 5+

Curriculum connections 

 KLAs The Arts, Technology
 ELAs Active learning process, Investigating technology, Imagining and responding

Related topics

• Place and belonging
• Storytelling
• Media literacy
• Design 

Before

• Talk about your favourite place; inside or out of doors
• Brainstorm what animation means 
• Play a few minutes of animation with the sound turned off. How are the pictures alone put together to tell the story
• Introduce some film-making vocabulary such as zoom in and out, long (or wide) shot, medium shot, close up  
• Use Wikipedia to assist with definitions
• Visit the Kahootz website

Meet the artists

Terry Oberg
Terry Oberg has taught in the Animation program at the Southbank Institute of Technology for the past ten years. He has a passion for animation, storytelling, multimedia technologies, drawing and teaching.

Terry was awarded the Southbank Institute of Technology's Outstanding Educator of the Year award in 2009, and is a qualified secondary and tertiary teacher. He has been employed as an artist-in-residence at a variety of primary and secondary schools, helping younger students to create animated films using Kahootz and Flash software. His involvement in the 2008 edition of Out of the Box saw him working with two classes of extraordinarily talented primary school students from Macgregor and Holland Park, and running a series of hour-long workshops at the festival.

Terry has made several short films over the years, including Waterwise, the winner of the Best Animated Film category in the 2008 Liquid Lens Film Festival. In addition to his animation and teaching work, he has been a book reviewer for The Courier Mail since 2000.

Deborah Cohen
Deborah is responsible for the development of the ACTF's educational resource packages and the Learning Centre materials. She has many years experience in education as a teacher and as a curriculum officer; writing and developing education resources, providing professional development and curriculum implementation.

Find out more about the artists