Sketch Star has gone offline.
Sketch Star from Miniclip is a fun and free tool for creating animated comics. On Sketch Star students can create draw animations from scratch or use pre-made shapes and characters. Students build their animations frame by frame. Each frame appears in a timeline that can be altered by dragging and dropping the frames into different sequences. The length of time that each frame is displayed can be adjusted too. Completed projects can be saved online.
Applications for Education
To save Sketch Star animations you do need to register for an account with an email address. If your students don’t have email addresses you could use the Gmail+1 hack to register them. Sketch Star also asks for birthdays. I just selected 1/1/1969 (not anywhere close to my real birthday) and got into the service.
Using Sketch Star could be a good way for students to create animations to go along with creative stories that they write as part of a language arts lesson.