5 Ways to Make Stop-motion and Time-lapse Movies

Creating a stop-motion video or a time-lapse videos can be a good way for students to tell a story in the style of Gumby. Making stop-motion and time-lapse videos can also be a good way for students to demonstrate how a lengthy process works without making people watch a long video. The following free tools make it relatively easy to create stop-motion and time-lapse videos.

Stop Motion Animator is a free Chrome app for creating stop motion videos. The app is free and easy to use. It does not even require students to create accounts in order to use it. Watch the following video to see how to use Stop Motion Animator.



ClapMotion is another Chrome app that students can use to create stop-motion videos. I don't have as much experience with this app as I do with Stop Motion Animator featured above. But in my limited use I found it just as easy to use as Stop Motion Animator. ClapMotion's promo video embedded below provides a nice example of how students can use ClapMotion in school.


Parapara Animation is a free animation creation tool that has been around of years. Rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. The tool was developed and is hosted by Mozilla. The tool is easy to use and it does not require registration in order to use it. Watch my tutorial video to learn how to use Parapara Animation.


OSnap is an iPad app (available in a free version and in a paid version) that you can use to create stop motion and time lapse videos. The app is quite easy to use. To create a video with the OSnap app you simply need to start a project and take a series of still pictures using your iPad’s camera. Then adjust the number of frame per second to edit your video. If you want to, you can add a sound track to your video by selecting audio files that are stored on your iPad. You can go back and edit your videos by removing images and from the project at any time. Completed projects can be stored on your iPad, uploaded to YouTube, or shared via email.

ABCya Animate is a free tool that students can use to create animations. It can be a great tool for elementary school and middle school students to use to create animations to use to tell a short story. For example, in my demonstration video the animation I started to make could be used as part of a larger story about marine life or ocean ecosystems. To complete the story I would need to add some more drawings and perhaps some text for clarification. Your students might also use short animations as part of larger multimedia project. Watch my demonstration video embedded below to learn more about how to use ABCya Animate.



Bonus item! 
For many years JellyCam was my go-to tool for making stop-motion videos. While it is still available to download and use for free, the developer is no longer supporting the software. If you want to give it a try anyway, watch my tutorial video to see how to get started.

Flipgrid Password-protected All Grids This Morning

This morning all teachers using Flipgrid were sent an email about privacy updates that they made to all accounts. Those updates included automatically password-protecting all Flipgrid grids that did not already have password-protection in place. That means that students will need to enter a password in order to view and or add to a Flipgrid grid. You can sign into your Flipgrid account to change the automatically set password.

The other part of Flipgrid's email to users mentioned the need for all teachers to verify and or update their account information. The next time you sign into your account you will be prompted to verify or update before you can access the rest of your teacher dashboard. Verifying and or updating takes just a minute, I did it in my account this morning.

Wondering what Flipgrid is? Watch my video overview of the service.

Not Going to ISTE? - Join the "Not at ISTE" IGNITE

Going to the annual ISTE conference can be a great way to learn about new and emerging trends in the field of educational technology. It's also a great place to connect with other educators. Unfortunately, it's also an expensive undertaking that many teachers simply can't afford. That's part of the reason that I'm not attending this year (believe it or not, running a site titled Free Technology for Teachers isn't lucrative).

For those of us who aren't going to ISTE Jen Wagner, Peggy George, and Vicky Sedgwick are putting together an online event called Not At ISTE IGNITE. Not at ISTE IGNITE will feature five minute, twenty slide presentations broadcast through Google Hangouts. If you would like to give a presentation during Not At ISTE IGNITE, complete this form. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by June 15th.

Thanks to Edublogs for sharing the Not At ISTE IGNITE information. 

Turn a Set of Physical Sticky Notes Into Digital Ones With Padlet's Catscan

Padlet has added a new feature called Catscan to their iPhone and iPad apps. Catscan's purpose is to let you take a picture of a set of physical sticky notes and then have those notes appear as individual notes on a Padlet wall. Once those notes are on your Padlet wall you'll be able to move them around and interact with them just like notes that you manually add to any other Padlet wall.

Catscan is a beta feature of the Padlet iOS apps so don't expect it to work perfectly right away. If you have physical stickies that are overlapping, Catscan will have trouble differentiating between them.

Applications for Education
If you lead group brainstorming sessions or gallery walks in which you have students place sticky notes on a board, Padlet's Catscan feature could provide you with a way to digitize and reuse those notes. Share the wall that the notes are added to and your students can help sort them and or add more ideas to the fall in the form of digital notes.

Watch this video for more ideas about adding notes to Padlet walls.