Schools Need to Teach VSL - Video as a Second Language

Grade 3-6 kids following the Animation Chef’s timing formulas for stop motion film making.

Here at Animating Kids! we make a ruckus about VSL - Video as a Second Language.

Why? 

As Youtube's Chief Business Officer Robert Kinsel recently pointed out (10:23 mark) - 450 hours of video are ingested every minute on Youtube.

This means Youtube is streaming a billion hours of video content everyday. 

Add Facebook, Instagram. Twitter, etc. for an additional billion hours of vids everyday.

LinkedIn lists “video production” as one of it’s top-ten searched employment categories by head hunters across a broad spectrum of industries.

Sound & video communication are becoming a basic language everyday in business, law, science, tech, education, etc.

What about kids?

-Cool videos about scientific thinking,

-The history of tech for kids,

-Calculus videos

-How-to vids on engineering for kids.

(Notice the STEM - science, technology, engineering, math - emphasis?)

The 800lb gorilla in the room is that media literacy skills are becoming a primary literacy for future generations.

A functional literacy as essential as reading or writing, speaking or listening!

Media education should be taught as a basic skill starting as young as the early elementary school ages.

We’ve been espousing this since 2003!

It needs to populate every kind of educational setting: libraries, after school, school classrooms, homeless shelter programs, retail enrichment courses, etc.

And you know what?

Kids are off-the-charts juiced with electricity about these skills.

Yet the adults, by and large still don’t get it.

This is the future. But it is not yet widely distributed.

Animating Kids! is a start.

We break visual and aural language skills down into simple bite-sized steps, like a basal early-reading curriculum would in a classroom.

And it compliments what already takes place in the classroom. The first step in video production is story development with writing, oral presentations and reading!

To turn the vetting of written ideas into pictures, and turn those pictures into living, breathing videos, requires a whole new way of thinking.

To start this journey, join us!

If you haven’t already downloaded our free start kit, A Taste of Animation, please click here.

Do these basic exercises and start developing video production as a second language for your kids.

No previous experience required.

Bon Animate!

Joe and the entire team at Animating Kids!