It’s that time of year. Time for a snow storm of technology ideas, templates, and resources. This is the fourth year I’ve shared activities and I’m loving the Winter Tech Blizzard theme.
I hope you check back daily to see what has been shared. Each day a new snowflake will appear on the Winter Tech Blizzard site. Click the snowflake and it will take you to the ideas for the day. Click the image below to join the fun.
Enjoy!
If you are interested in previous years, I linked them all in THIS post.
If you have been around my blogs for any length of time, then you know my love for digital stickers on student work. I usually create mine in Google Slides and have tutorials to do so. Did you know you can also create these stickers in Canva? Well today is the day to learn all about it.
Click create a design and set your page to square. I used a 10 in by 10 in design.
2. Next, find the elements you want to use. I picked a sun and then “shine” to get the orange pieces around it. That is the part I plan to rotate during the animation. I also want it to say, “Your work shines” so I add “Your work” with a text box.
3. Now click the duplicate button on this page.
4. On this new page we will do 2 things. First, rotate the orange shine part by clicking on that element and using the rotate handle that appears. Second, I used one of the text elements and found one that looked shiny and added the S for shines.
5. Continue with these steps, rotating the sun and adding a letter to shines until you have the word shines spelled out. I ended up with 7 pages.
6. Now the fun part begins. First we want to set the timing for our stop motion. The timing is located in the top bar. I set mine to 0.2 but you can play around with this. 0.1 is faster, 0.3 is slower.
7. Now it’s time to download our design. Click the share button, then download, then select GIF at the bottom.
Here is you animated sticker. This isn’t the only way to animate stickers in Canva. This is actually very similar to the Google Slides process. These are also not transparent but you can always try unscreen.com. Sometimes it works.
I hope you found this tutorial useful. As I have mentioned in previous posts, my students LOVE animated stickers on their digital work and I teach high school. These stickers are for everyone!! And look at that, I didn’t use a Bitmoji even though you can connect your Bitmoji to Canva. What?!? Maybe we can do that the next time.
Sometimes you stumble across something and you are not sure exactly HOW you will use it in the classroom but you need to know about it JUST IN CASE you need it. This is one of those apps. I’m thinking my students might be able to use this when they make their choose your own adventure stories or their quadrilateral comics.
1. Draw a picture. I learned from experience that you want shoes facing the same direction because when your character is walking, their foot will be turned the wrong direction if you don’t. LOL!!! I drew a picture of Mr. Tolen because it was his birthday.
2. Upload your image to the website. The program will ask you to set your bending reference points. You can adjust these later if they aren’t working correctly.
3. Select the animation you want to try. I tried them ALL! It was so much fun. Some of them work really well, some not as well. Pick the one you want.
Have you even wanted a short little video clip as a hook to start your lesson? Yarn.co might be able to help. I found this gem from @emmabalansay on TikTok and I thing it’s gem.
A few years ago, I posted about how to make Stop Motion animated GIFs using Google Slides and Tall Tweets. You can see that tutorial HERE.
Tall Tweets Update (not transparent)
Since that time, Tall Tweets has made some updates. So before I launch into how to make TRANSPARENT stop motion animations, let me show you the Tall Tweets update. Google Slides and Tall Tweets, as of this post, will not allow for transparent gifs. Maybe that is an update they can make soon (I did reach out on Twitter, so we’ll see if they can make it happen!). Tall Tweets did update with an add-on so you no longer have to go to the TallTweets site once you install.
Go to TallTweets and click Creator Studio (see image below). It will ask you to install.
Once installed, open a previous Stop Motion Google Slide or create a new one. When you are ready to create your animated GIF, go to add-ons and click Creator Studio. It will ask you to authorize the first time. Once you authorize, you will have to go to add-ons and click it again to make it run.
A panel will open on the right. Set your slide time. In Tall Tweets I started with .2 so that’s what I will try here.
Scroll to the bottom and click GO. You will have the option to download or view. You can view it to see if you need to adjust the time. When you are ready, click the download button and use the image like before. Notice that in Creator Studio you also have the option to make a video instead of a gif if you want to.
It’s a nice little update and added a few features. But sometimes you just need a transparent gif. I wanted to create a bubbling cauldron that I could use in an escape room but also in a presentation. I also wanted to create some googley eyes to use in a presentation. I created both in Keynote.
Keynote for Transparent GIFs
Open a new Keynote document and set the size you want. I like to make mine square but it can be any size. Go to document in the top right corner and change widescreen to custom size and change it to 500 pts by 500 pts.
Now create your animation, just like we did in Google Slides. Duplicate, change a little, duplicate, change a little,… Once your creation is ready, now we want to change the background to transparent. We don’t want to do this until the end because it turns black which is difficult to work on.
Under format (top right corner) switch background to no fill.
Your image will go from the first to the second.
If you have a lot of slides, you might want to make this change is slide layout, it will change all of the slides at once. If not, you can just change slide by slide.
Now we are ready to export our animation. Go to file, export to, animated GIF.
I choose these settings, but you can adjust the slider to make your gif work the way you want. I ended up sliding the slider to 3 for my cauldron. Also make sure you you start at slide one and include all of your slides. It will default to the one slide you are on.
Now you have a transparent image to use anywhere an animated gif can be used.
PowerPoint
PowerPoint will also export to an animated gif. I used to change my speed below one frame per second, but recently I haven’t been able to do this. This makes your animation SOOOO SLOOOOOW. For this reason I will no longer be able to recommend PowerPoint to make animated GIFS. If you know a work around for this, please let me know!!!!
I hope this helps you up your animated gif game! Please tag me on Twitter or Instagram if you make something! I LOVE LOVE LOVE to see them!
I has hanging on Teacher TikTok and saw this idea from @emily_karst. My head nearly exploded! I love when I see new things for the first time!!!
This quickly creates gifs from youtube videos.
Step 1
(assuming you already have your video selected)
Type GIF before the word youtube.
Step 2
Press enter and a new website will open and your video will load.
Isn’t the website color palette sooo cute!
Step 3
Select the clip you want as the gif by dragging the box at the bottom. You can preview it and move it again if it’s not what you wanted.
Step 4
Click Trim Video in the top right corner.
Now you can add text, graphics, or any of the adjustments.
Step 5
Click create gif in the top right corner.
You can add tags etc if you want to. I love that you can include sound.
Click next.
Step 6
Share it!
You have many options to choose from including download.
GIF – Just Fold It In
And there you have it! Why did I pick this GIF? This is how I feel when I’m asked to implement something new and I ask for clarification. Reflecting on this, I try to be aware when I teach so I don’t tell them to just FOLD IT IN. LOL
This is more fun and less educational but we need fun sometimes!!!
I love Bitmojis! I know it’s not for everyone, but they just make me happy. They make students happy too! My students love when I put “stickers” on their digital work. They sometimes even give me stickers as suggestions when they submit a project. A few years ago, I wrote a blog post about creating custom feedback stickers and putting them in Google Keep for ease of use.
Today I’m going to update that post with animated gif stickers. I mean, the only thing that could be better than Bitmoji stickers is animated Bitmoji stickers!!!
Open a new Google Slides (or PowerPoint, or Keynote if you want an easy transparent background) and go to file – page setup, select custom and change the size to 8 x 8 inches.
If you are using PowerPoint or Keynote, change the background to Transparent.
Select the Bitmoji you want to use from the Chrome Extension and drag it to the Google Slide. Tutorial here
Animate your sticker slide by slide! Tutorial here
Here are a few ideas:
Add word by word and or a moving arrow
Add letter by letter
Moving Bitmoji
Sparkles!!!
Turn your sticker into an animated GIF
Google Slides – TallTweets.com is so easy to use (tutorial here). It allows you to simply load your presentation with out any additional steps.
If you REALLY want a transparent background, the easiest way is to use PowerPoint or Keynote. They both have export as GIF options (come on Google!!!)
Open keep.google.com. By placing your image in Google Keep, you can simply drag your sticker into any Google Slide or Doc you want to use them in.
Create a new note with image.
Select your sticker. I don’t title it because it will drag the title with it. You can create a label called stickers or feedback so you can sort if you would like.
Now open something to give feedback on. The image below is a Google Slide. On the RIGHT you will see 3 icons. The middle one is Google Keep.
It opens your Google Keep and you can see your stickers. Select the one you want and drag it over.
Resize.
Done!
I know you’re thinking, this is great for elementary but I teach middle or high school. Your secondary students will LOVE these. They are still just kids!
Infinitely Teaching 