Stop Motion Animation

Our school district recently purchased SAM animation software and pushed it out to all our student computers. It is a very easy program designed to make stop motion animation videos. Right now our kids are "playing" with it to learn the software but I can see some very practical applications using it in science. In this video you will see the kids "playing" and then it actually being used as part of an experiment. I was in the room helping with the video taping with the children and it was very easy for the kids to set up. Today one of our first grade teachers were talking about some eggs they are hatching in the classroom and I immediately thought that would be a great use for the software. You can program it to take pictures (using a web cam) on a specific time schedule around the day the eggs are suppose to hatch. We had a lively debate about plants moving in my classroom. The kids could use the program to set up an experiment to see if plants move. The free demo can be downloaded HERE. The software and a site license can be purchased for $299 which I thought was pretty good for an entire school.

Comments

Beth said…

Awesome ideas! I love the possible applications in longer-term science experiments. And the options for writing (and narrating) simple stop motion stories are endless!

Definitely something I'll be mentioning to the wiki-wiks who buy our software :)

April 6, 2011 at 6:16 PM

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.

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.

QR Project - Open House

Twitter Post Link - https://bit.ly/3Umic7r I saw this adorable QR code project on Twitter and decided to try it out with a couple of third grade classes. We have several schools in our district who are "Leader in Me" schools and I asked a teacher if I could come in and make them for her open house (you don't need to be a "Leader in Me" school but I know they do a lot of goal setting and mission statements). She loved the idea! I decided to use Flip (formally Flipgrid) to do the recording. The web based program is free for educators and automatically generates the needed QR code. We started on a Thursday. I pulled students into the hall to get a picture of them holding a square piece of paper prior to an ELA block. The paper acted as a place holder for the QR code (which is square) and ensured I got the correct hand spacing so the students looked like they were holding the QR code. I found a spot that didn't have anything in the background. The background...

Notebooking, Teaching, and Technology

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