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.

10 Good Templates for Science, Social Studies, and Language Arts Lessons

Earlier this week I published a post about Read Write Think's theme poem online activity. Obviously, that activity is a great fit for a language arts lesson. RWT is known for language arts interactive activities and templates. Dig a little deeper into RWT and you'll find interactive activities, apps, and templates that can be used in science and social studies lessons too.

Read Write Think offers a good interactive guide that can help students craft a good persuasive essay. The Persuasion Map asks students to start with a thesis statement before walking them through developing support for that thesis. Students can print their persuasion maps or email them to you. RWT offers a number of lesson plans that incorporate the Persuasion Map. You can find those lessons here.

Essay Map provides students with step by step guidance in the construction of an informational essay. Some of my students seem to struggle most with constructing an introduction and conclusion to their essays. Essay Map is particularly good for helping students visualize the steps needed to construct good introductory and conclusion paragraphs. After students complete all of the steps in their Essay Map they can print their essay outlines.

Read Write Think's Crossword Puzzle Generator makes it easy to create your own crossword puzzles. To create your puzzle simply enter a list of words, a set of clues for your words, and then let the generator make a puzzle for you. You can test the puzzle before printing it. You can print blank puzzles and answer sheets from the puzzle generator.

Alphabet Organizer is a great little tool from Read Write Think that students can use to create alphabet charts and books. The idea behind Alphabet Organizer is to help students make visual connections between letters of the alphabet and the first letter of common words. In the video below I demonstrate how to use this tool.



RWT Timeline is available as a web app (Flash required), as an Android app, and as an iPad app. All three versions make it easy for students to create a timeline for a series of events. In the video below I demonstrate how to use the web version of the RWT Timeline creation tool.




RWT's Animal Inquiry guide is a good fit for elementary school science lessons. Animal Inquiry provides students with four templates; animal facts, animal babies, animal interactions, and animal habitats. Each template is an interactive template in which students respond to three prompts to help them create short reports about animals they are studying. Read Write Think suggests using the questions in the Animal Inquiry template as prompts for research. The questions in the templates could also be good for helping students brainstorm additional questions to research.

RWT's Theme Poems interactive provides students with 32 pictures to use as the basis for writing short poems. To write a poem students launch the interactive then choose a theme. Within each of the five themes students will find related images. Once they choose an image students are prompted to write the words that come to mind as they look at the image. Students then create poems from those words. The finished product can be saved as a PDF and or emailed to a teacher from the RWT site.

Read Write Think offers a free program called the Profile Publisher. Profile Publisher allows students to create and print mock-ups of social network profiles. Students can create profiles for themselves of for fictional characters. Profile Publisher includes fields for "about me," "blog posts," "interests," and all of the other profile fields typically found on a social network. Completed profiles can be printed.

The RWT Flip Book app is available for iPad, for Android, and for use in your web browser (Chrome or Firefox is recommended). RWT Flip Book lets students create books by typing or by drawing on the pages in their books. There is a variety of page templates that students can choose to use within their books. Some templates are text-only, some are drawing-only, and some are a mix of drawing and text templates. To use RWT Flip Book students simply open the app, enter their first names, then start creating their first pages.

Read Write Think's Word Mover app for iOS, Android, and web browser helps students develop poems and short stories. When students open the Word Mover app they are shown a selection of words that they can drag onto a canvas to construct a poem or story. Word Mover provides students with eight canvas backgrounds on which they can construct their poems. If the word bank provided by Word Mover doesn’t offer enough words they can add their own words to the word bank.