Nov 19, 2013

Stop Motion Studio - one simple app with big results in classrooms

I recently finished teaching Exploring iPads for Teaching and Learning  and I showed the teachers a pretty large collection of apps. I often get K-12 teachers, who teach a variety of topics in my classes so the apps I tend to focus on are ones that can be used in any classroom. This class was no different. I introduced them to the standard apps (Dropbox, ClassDojo, SoundCloud, Educreations...).  Each teacher found a different app that they thought they would use immediately. Lauren Schmitz, who teaches art in our elementary district was fascinated by Stop Motion Studio by CATEATER. She had an idea before I was even done modeling the app.

This is a tool that invokes that kind of reaction from many teachers! For such a simple app, it sure can create amazing results in the classroom. Teachers love the engagement level it creates, along with its ease of use, and students love the ability to create.



So what is Stop Motion Studio? It is an app that allows you to stitch together a collection of still images to create a movie. Sound simple?  It  is. You have the ability to speed up or slow down your animation, and you can even add sound to your animation once you are done capturing your images. I can't believe this app is free. There is an in-app purchase to add more features, but honestly, the free version is amazing.

 Below is a video that Lauren created to model the drawing process on a harvest scene:




I spent an hour in a first grade classroom this week helping them focus on word families. The teacher, Courtney Niemeyer, and I took fifteen minutes to model the activity from start to finish. We then gave partners of students a production board, a collection of letters and an ipad. They did the rest! We discovered that the students not only wanted to create more words than we required, they spoke each word out loud while it was being spelled in the animation!

Here is a quick video I took as the students went around and watched each other's productions:

We will be using this same app to study the concept of motion later in the week.

I have been doing stop motion projects in classroom for a number of years with digital cameras and computers. I have to say that this method takes so much less time and creates the same results. Kudos to the teachers for exploring the use of this technology in the classroom and kudos to Cateater for allowing the app to be free!

1 comment:

CStone said...

Hey, this looks just what I'd like to do with my middle school tech class!