Animated Gifs in the Classroom

Animated Gifs are all the rage these days! They allow you to put a collection of images together and create a single animated image. They are also a great tool to use in the classroom. In Casey VanEpps and Jen Humphreys' fifth grade class they used animated gif creation to support learning and understanding the phases of the moon. Students used their iPads to gather images of each phase of the moon. They used the app GIF Maker to create the animated gif. Gif Maker has a simple and streamlined interface that allows you to add emojis, text, images, or both to a page. Add pages to stitch together as either an animated gif or video.

Using Google Docs with Animated Gifs

Students were then able to take their beautiful animated gifs and insert them into a Google Doc and write about what they learned. Some students used the new Google Docs template library on iOS to produce a slick doc with animations. Check out the final product below!