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
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