Students Creating GIFs

[LAST CONTENT UPDATE TO THIS PAGE: Sept 2020]

Over the past few months, we have become rather obsessed with GIFs. No, they're nothing new. They've been around since 1987. But they have made a HUGE comeback on social media in the past two years---especially the social media that students are likely to frequent such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Imgur.

Usually the GIFs that are shared on those social media sites are funny. We think funny is great. But when humor can be combined with an educational concept in a GIF---you get something beautiful.  We create GIFs that often use science vocabulary or animate processes/concepts; you can see our GIFs on our GIF page! 

How do students make a GIF? [Tutorial Video Updated 9/3/2020]
Wouldn't it be wonderful if students had the opportunity to be the creators---and not just consumers---of GIFs? 

Here is an updated tutorial https://youtu.be/N7hacHpCPyk on how to create a GIF using www.abcya.com/animate.htm. This website (not affiliated) is a great, free site that works nicely for students to illustrate a GIF.  There is also an inexpensive iPad app version. 

GIF was created quickly using www.abcya.com/animate.htm! See the tutorial video above.

What if technology is limited and/or I want to draw by hand? 
After you watch the video above to understand how GIF creation works, you can instead have your students do their illustrations on paper. Use a smartphone to take pictures of each of these individually. Then load the pictures into a GIF animate website like http://gifmaker.me. ​

What do you use to make your GIFs?
Here are the tools we use! Even the small amount of animations we put into our videos are actually GIFs!