Summary: I hope this will encourage Moodle developers to work on adding SVG-edit with Sozi support to enable students and teachers to draw and make a more colourful, animated learning experience, one that can be shared with grandma in her ebook reader - thank you!

Argument:

Drawing is fun, beautiful illustrations can be used to clarify and enhance understanding, and comics and animated shorts are motivational to create, watch, and share, and it is educational to discuss art - both what is denoted and connotations or associations we get from interacting with it.

Hattie's effect studies of what works in education lists these factors that have an effect size of .7 or greater since these are significant gains:

• Student self-assessment/self-grading
• Response to intervention
• Teacher credibility *
• Providing formative assessments *
• Classroom discussion *
• Teacher clarity *
• Feedback *
• Reciprocal teaching *
• Teacher-student relationships fostered *
• Spaced vs. mass practice

I have added an extra star at the end of all the factors where a drawing could be the resource or activity in Moodle. Teachers and students use and create drawings in just about any subject.

Drawing animated illustrations as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) on-line has become very easy, thanks to the efforts of Ahmad Syazwan, who added Sozi-animation frames to SVG-edit by Narendra Sisodiya and others. Sozi is an Inkscape extension created by Guillaume Savaton, which can be used off-line to created animated SVG-files. All major browsers - even mobile - support displaying SVG-illustrations.

SVG-illustrations are crisp and clear at all zoom-levels, and Ahmad Syazwan's work will let you draw frames above objects in a drawing and then set animation length and method between the frames - like fast, slow etc.

EPUB 3 is the open standard format for ebooks the publishing industry uses, think of it as HTML 5 domesticated or a web site in a box, adding structured navigation and universal accessibility. SVG is part of the EPUB 3 standard, because ebooks require responsive design or fixed design as childrens first device is a smartphone or tablet and then perhaps a PC. Lucimoo is a tool you can add to the Moodle Book module to import and export EPUB 3 ebooks. Giving the children or students the ability to draw animated illustrations within Moodle and then export these into EPUB 3 ebooks makes sense.

To get students started, it is possible for teachers to add a library of SVG drawings to Moodle from http://openclipart.org/ .

Resources:

http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/what-works-in-education-hatties-list-of-the-greatest-effects-and-why-it-matters/

EPUB 3 in and out of Moodle
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-37199

Sheena Vaidyanathan - primary school art teacher in California
http://www.digitalartforall.com/
http://www.computersforcreativity.com/

Inkscape comics tutorials - easy to add Sozi animation frames
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8beB21L5Ke8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M3LMAZSNog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsAhjd94feU

Sozi - how to use layers - shows how to add foreground and background layers to illustrate the words MORNING - NOON - EVENING - NIGHT (he starts by downloading a sample source file - this step is not necessary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgAmuvZE_mw

Sozi - transition paths tutorial - shows how to use an arbitrarily drawn path as a transition between two frames.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnDqsPVtjNQ

Sozi presentations
http://sozi.wikidot.com/presentations

Sozi presentation about the Einstein telescope
http://www.gwoptics.org/research/et/layout/ET_layout_02.svg

Sozi presentation about a blueray project - nice zooming and pacing - click to move forward
http://opendreambox.org/~fraxinas/bluray-authoring.svg

Sozi tutorials on YouTube - see if you find one you like
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sozi+tutorial

Sozi scientific example - the punch is at the very end - the "Thank you".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aABIgk_Lkkg

Sozi experiment with embedded video - Environmental Psychology meets Gaming Lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grGFT3tVQQc

Sozi source with some examples at Github - these must be high-lighted, copied and saved as SVG-files to be viewed.
https://github.com/senshu/Sozi/tree/master/samples

SVG-edit
http://code.google.com/p/svg-edit/

SVG-edit demo
http://svg-edit.googlecode.com/svn/branches/2.6/editor/svg-editor.html

Adding Sozi to SVG-edit
https://github.com/asyazwan/ext-sozi
http://asyazwan.github.com/ext-sozi/ext-sozi-guide.png

SVG-edit with Sozi demo - draw a few objects, then click Sozi-button to add frames - expand layer view on right hand side of the screen, save to disk, open and view animated illustration in browser, e.g. Firefox.
http://asyazwan.github.com/ext-sozi/editor/