Thursday, October 15, 2015

Teaching with GIFs?

We should probably start with the pronunciation controversy: some people insist that  ".gif" is pronounced like the first syllable of "Jiffy," while others are equally passionate that it sounds like the first part of "Gift." I don't care how anyone pronounces it :)

But something I do care about: maybe we could use .gifs in teaching? Greg Shenk, psych teacher extraordinaire from CT shared this .gif his students made of neural depolarization. I love it - short, detailed, and on a loop. Might be cool to have this running behind a lecture/discussion of depolarization, talking about the process and pointing at details in the animation. Or students could look at it on their own devices and be ready to narrate the process using correct terminology? Cool possibilities.

Does anyone else do "animations" or other small videos like this with your classes? Maybe this could be a new thing!

Credit for the video goes to a few of Greg's awesome students:
Alec Bernardi
Aleks Nowicki
Mason DiCicco



posted by Rob McEntarffer

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4 comments:

  1. mariavitaOctober 16, 2015 at 9:27 AM

    I LOVE THIS!!!!! Thanks for sharing it Rob! I think I see "sodium Na+ ions going in" and "potassium K+ ions going out," and perhaps even some calcium ions facilitating the release of neurotransmitters!!! WOW!!!!!

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  2. mariavitaOctober 17, 2015 at 6:40 AM

    YAY GREG!!!!!!!

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  3. AnonymousNovember 22, 2015 at 10:05 AM

    Hi I love it and Thank you for sharing this to us!

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  4. Mr. CDecember 21, 2015 at 8:41 AM

    I use Gifs any chance I get. Going to giphy.com and searching has produced a lot of great stuff and it's an easy site to use. On my quizizz quizzes, I'll put gifs into the questions. For example, I had a standard question on narcolepsy. So I added a gif of Rusty the narcoleptic poodle as the background. On a question about an EEG, I'll have a gif of one running in the background.

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