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GIF JAM

Animated GIFs have been featured on this site as regular media assignments in the EdMedia program as a means to practice techniques in photography, videography and web publishing to name a few. The GIF JAM occuring for the EdMedia Monday this March 14th will showcase sources of GIFs, excellent courses and tools for making GIFS and open a discussion about how they can be used for educational purposes. ON this post I will try to cover some of the history of the GIF, review past educational GIF projects and point you to some next steps for using GIFs in your course, or just for playing around.

constructionGIFstory

To kick things off lets go back the beginning and review some GIFstory. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format and its important to remember how integral the characteristic of this format have led to the GIFs proliferation.

historyYou can read this piece from the website Mashable for good synopsis on the history of the GIF and also check out this 6 min documenary covering the rise of the GIF to from its inception in 1987 to today.

GIFs Today

Today GIFS can be found everywhere. The popular website Giphy has become the defacto clearing house for sharing and showing all the latest, and the GIF Keyboard is popping up on many social media platforms including twitter and facebook. I have posted a few of my favorite sites and recent pages below, but you do not have to look far to find an animated GIF these days.

Eg. of Cool GIFS

LenzLaw

GIFs in Education

As a form of cultural expression you may be surprised to learn that the animated GIF has a strong and growing place in the landscape of educational media. Several of our past EMP participants have created GIFs for Physics, Physics, Archives, Library, Mathematics, to name a few. The assignments I’ve created have been design to test technical knowledge and use the media theory.

GIF assignment 1:

GIF assignment 2: (as OERS)

There are many great courses on the internet dedicated to the animated GIF so for further exploration please check out these pages.

GIF MASTERS

@eleanor_lutz

http://tabletopwhale.com/index.html

http://tabletopwhale.com/2014/11/03/how-to-make-an-animated-infographic.html

How to make GIFS

 

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Mini teaching tool: How to handle photos in the archives

In the archives, we have thousands of photos that have been produced by SFU departments over the last 50 years, plus plenty of others that are parGIF files showing the proper way to handle archival photost of the records donated by faculty, campus community members or others.

Photographic prints are vulnerable to the oils on our hands, so we ask users to always wear gloves to provide a barrier between your hands and the prints.

The paper supports that images are printed on can also become vulnerable and fragile as they age, so we show users how to carefully turn one image at a time to protect the prints.

These images are part of the F-247 collection which contains material from the Media and Public Affairs Office of SFU.

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GIFS go BOOM!

GIF GIF

Welcome to the world of the animated GIF! One of the final tasks of our EMP program is to get our participants familiar with making and sharing media in the OPEN.  For us that means posting to the Open Educational Media site here!

The assignment as posted in Canvas was to create an animated GIF using Gifboom! and upload it as a post.  Sadly Gifboom! is no longer operational, but some alternatives have been provided in Canvas .

While this may prove to be a challenge, as a first step you may just want to comment on this post. If nothing else you can test that your account works! See you next week at the show ‘n tell!

 

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Physics Doodles: Video and GIF

I created a short “doodle” video and a GIF to use in my PHYS 102 Physics for the Life Sciences II class. This is an algebra-based first-year course for students studying life science majors such as Biology or BPK. The video explains Faraday Law’s of Electromagnetic Induction and the GIF illustrates Lenz’s Law which is related to Faraday’s Law. Students often find the concepts behind these laws confusing so I though that learning tools that they can look at over and over again might be helpful to them.

I placed the doodle video on YouTube. It can be found here: Physics Doodle: Faraday’s Law

This is the Lenz’s Law GIF:

LenzLaw