Digital Stop Motion Animations

I love the idea of stop motion animation but not the headache of it. It is something I have always wanted to try in the classroom but when I started thinking about all the "stuff" it requires - props, lighting, storage space, a fixed camera, software, oddles of time...I pretty much said:

I follow an art teacher (Tricia Fuglestad) on Twitter who does an excellent job blending art and technology together and she did a recent post on stop motion. This got me thinking about a "Flipbook with Google Slides" session I took at a conference last summer with Abby Schiferl where I created a vocabulary animation for science.

I decided to use digital tools to try and re-create some of Tricia's samples.

They were super easy to make. I did find one of the best and most helpful blog post from Matt Miller regarding formatting tips for animating with Google Slides, which helped greatly, I made the "cheat sheet" below from it.

The basic idea is that you keep duplicating the slides but move elements (much like in stop motion filming) in order to create a "moving" animation. In this example the rain drop moved around the water cycle explaining each step. Once you are done you publish it so the motion from slide to slide is automatic.

There are two ways to publish your finished animation. The easiest way is with the website Tall Tweet but that is only good for smaller animations since it is time consuming for the site to upload and render projects. The largest presentation I have uploaded to the site has been 36 slides. It is also possible that your district may block the site so you have the second option of publishing within Google Slides as well. I have made a cheat sheet below walking you through both publishing options.

Teachers in our district have been given the option of taking part in some virtual tech training over the summer and I created a video explaining the process of animating with Google Slides in one of my modules. If you are interested feel free to watch (I had fun putting it together...just ignore the district stuff I mention).

Here is a slightly more academic example that I created using the "publish to the web" option through Google Slides. This animation was close to 80 slides long.

If you have animated with Google Slides I would love to see some more examples! You can link them in the comments below or post on Twitter and tag me @atechcoachlife.

Comments

Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition Activity

I saw this activity at a science conference years ago and haven't had a chance to use it in a classroom until this week (mainly because I didn't teach weathering, erosion, and deposition). It is a great way to reinforce the definition of the weathering, erosion, and deposition in a highly kinesthetic manner. Basically you break the students up into groups of three. One group is "Weathering" another group is "Erosion" and the third group is "Deposition". Add tape to the back because you are going to stick them to the forehead of the children in each group. The "weathering" students get a sheet of paper that is their "rock" they will be breaking down. At the start of the activity the "weathering" students will start ripping tiny pieces of their "rock" and handing it to the "erosion" students. The "erosion" students will be running their tiny piece of "rock&

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

Bill Nye Songs with Lyrics

At the end of the Bill Nye videos he always has a fun song that goes with the episode. You can find many of the songs as stand alone videos on YouTube. This came in handy because today I am teaching a lesson on layers of the atmosphere and found a song from his Atmosphere video on YouTube titled "Fresh Aire." I really wanted to remix it and put the lyrics on the video (so the kids could sing along and see how the lyrics matched the lesson). The first thing I did was found a site that has all the Bill Nye lyrics posted used my YouTube downloader ( see instructions here ) and downloaded the song. I then imported the video into Movie Maker Live and used the caption feature to put the lyrics on the different frames (cutting and pasting from the lyrics site into Movie Maker Live). I saved the video and reposted to YouTube so other teachers could use the video with lyrics (the finished video is posted above). The process was pretty easy and I am thinking about doing it for more

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

Search This Blog