So what is stop motion? Basically, it's taking a lot of pictures of something and manipulating that something just a teeeeennny bit for each picture. Then you run all the pictures together and it becomes an animation. Think the old Rudolph Christmas movie. It was done in stop motion. There are two stop motion Chrome apps that Sarah showed me: Stop Motion Animator and Clap Motion. Both essentially do the same thing, except Clap Motion lets you take photos by clapping - a really cool feature, but I'm not sure how it would work with a whole class working on a project in the same room. Both use a technique called onion skinning, which allows you to see a faint ghost image of your previous photo so that you know how much to move your object before taking another photo. It's very helpful. It also helps to use a small document camera or a webcam if you are using a Chromebook to take pictures. The forward facing camera makes taking photos for stop motion a challenge, but it's super easy to use a webcam or document camera. Our librarian, Brian, suggested the document camera - a big thank you to him for the idea! My (very) amateur stop motion video using Stop Motion Animator So what can you do in the classroom with stop motion? There are loads of possibilities, really! Hatten (2014) suggests, "Stop animation is ideal for helping students learn about concepts that involve processes and progressions — anything that benefits from including an element of movement to explain how it works." Her article on using stop motion in the classroom, while elementary focused, gives some really great suggestions that apply to all levels. This article from Discovery Education gives some excellent examples by subject area. YouTube can provide you with hours of stop motion entertainment. However you decide to use it, the level of student engagement is bound to be high, and stop motion gives the the opportunity to really use their creativity! Hatten, S. (2014, Aug. 15). Engage elementary students with stop animation! Retrieved
from https://www.iste.org/explore/articleDetail?articleid=128
0 Comments
You may notice a couple of things about the blog. One: it's been a month since I've posted - sorry about that! I have been fortunate to have been very busy this past month. Two: I've given the blog a bit of a makeover! My husband, who works in advertising, and I came up with a new name. Welcome to IgnitEDlearning! I hope you like the change as much as I do. For today's Digital Tool Tidbit, we are talking SlidesCarnival. One of my fellow Instructional Facilitators, Teresa, introduced me to SlidesCarnival when we were working on presentations for our district mini-conference. I immediately fell in lllooovvve. In a nutshell, SlidesCarnival provides FREE Google Slides and PowerPoint templates. They are all customizable and help you to create a presentation that is visually appealing and engaging. Here are a couple of title pages for presentations I have used: Each template also has a page with little icons that you can copy and paste anywhere in the presentation. You can change the colors of the icons as well. Plus, downloading the templates is super easy! With all this said, I'll offer a little food for thought on the idea of slide presentations. Slide presentations can be very ineffective and not allow students to learn. Slides can easily turn into a "sit and get" presentation, where students jot down notes but aren't truly engaged. I had a professor in college who literally stood at the front and read directly from her slides, adding no additional information. I tried my best to write everything down, but she went too fast for me to get everything; then one day she made the files available to us; at that point I quit writing and completely checked out.
I challenge you to make slides engaging for students, using them for discussion starters, or make them interactive, using Pear Deck or Nearpod. Use Slides for student collaboration or interactive activities, like these from Ditch That Textbook. There are so many possibilities beyond the sit and get! |
AuthorChristin Barkemeyer Archives
April 2020
Categories
All
|