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I just watched David Pogue’s New York Times video about iStop Motion, a shareware for Mac that facilitates stop motion animation. Stop motion animation is a classic form of animation in which objects — usually clay — are photographed, then repositioned, then photographed again. The process, at the professional level, is repeated thousands of times. If you’ve seen Chicken Run, the Wallace and Gromit films, or the classic California Raisins commercials, then you’ve seen stop action animation (sometimes known by the brand name Claymation) in action.

Stop action animation — which can be accomplished even more quickly in the classroom if small toys are substituted for making clay figures — is a big hit with students and gives them another way to demonstrate learning.

Pogue’s three-minute video also includes samples of videos made by the kids in his family, which can be useful for showing to students.

View the New York Times video>>

Go to the iStop Motion Web site>>

If your school uses Mac OSX, you might want to try iStop Motion’s demo version. If you do, drop us a line!

I haven’t used iStop Motion before, but I have worked with stop motion animation with elementary students. A few years ago, a group of our third grade students created a school Film Festival using clay animation. We tried a variety of software, including hooking a camcorder up to iMovie (and pressing the space bar twice to quickly capture a frame) and Tech4Learning’s Clay Animation kit.

Another no-cost option for stop-action animation, now that we have switched to PCs, is to use Microsoft MovieMaker:

• Shoot still photos and download them to the computer.
• Open Microsoft MovieMaker (which ships for free as part of the Windows XP and beyond operating systems)
• Go to Tools > Options > Advanced and set the default picture import time to .25 seconds. Technically, professional stop action animators shoot 30 frames per second, but, especially if you are working with elementary students, that level of detail can be overly time-consuming in an already jam-packed curriculum.
• Use the left menu to import the photos into MovieMaker.
• Highlight all of the images when they are listed in the center Collections pane.
• Drag them all to the timeline.
• Import background music by clicking “Import audio or music” from the left menu of options.
• Add titles and credits by following the “Add titles or credits” link on the left menu of options.
• Voila!

Our district upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 this fall. Many of us are enjoying the new features available in Microsoft Word (once we get used to where things are located!). One of the neat features is the ability to type blog postings in Word. Type in your blog’s URL, username, and password, and Word instantly transfers the content to your blog. I used Word to publish this post. This is a faster, more flexible, and more efficient way to post text to a blog. When you’re done writing your post, you can save it as a Word document.

You can also send updates to an existing blog post. I used two different WordPress blogs to test out this tool.

And unlike most blogs, which require you to upload an image separately, somehow Word is able to send along images embedded in a Word document (such as the one above) along with your blog posting, making it easier than ever to add visually interesting content to your blog. (Though I have noticed that it requires you to log in twice. Maybe you log in once to send the image and the other time to send the text?) And if you’ve captured an image from the Web, the image is even a link!

Set your categories in your blog first, then use “Insert Category.”

No more cut and paste! Nifty.

(Image from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx)