Stop Motion Susustudio

Recently, a Physics teacher came in to the CTL with this idea for his students. He was going to administer an assessement, idenitfy students weak areas, and assign them those topics to create a tutorial using stop motion film making.

So, I never took Physics. I don't know anything about it. Even when It was rolled into my Physical Science class, I had a tendency to check out. The instrucotr wanted an example to show the students and an activity for them to do as the guided practice, because duh... That's what we do! 

I had already been thinking about exploring this world and found the free app for iPad, Stop Motion Studio, but somehow lost all time to play with it ahead of time. The Ed Tech Specialist, Lisa, and I sat down and learned the app in about 10 minutes. Then, we brainstormed an idea for our movie... We were going to make a stop motion movie on making a stop motion movie! 

Stop Motion Studio was actually pretty easy to learn and the price is RIGHT!  There is a paid version that allows you to upload your photos and change themes, but it's not totally necessary. We had one person write out the post it notes and place them, and the other snapped photos. Once we were done, Lisa exported the video to her camera roll and Air Dropped it to my iPad. From there, I pulled it into iMovie where I added my voice over, stock music, and slowed the frames down a bit more since there were parts that were still too fast for my eyes to read the post its. After that, I reviewed it and thought anout how i wanted to write this post and so I added a scrolling credits slide with an app called, Scrolling Credits. Now, let me say, most things technology are intuitive for me, but that app had me frustrated. I ended up figuring it out after 10-15 minutes, but that is too long for any of my students. Anyway, saved it as a photo and added it to the end of my movie. 

I love the idea of using stop motion as part of a process of learning, especially for something that requires multiple steps. The use of stop motion requires the user to take photos along the way and if the student is doing something, taking a photo, then doing the next step, taking another photo, and so on, the student has to really think about what they are doing and why. As educators, we know that people kearn and retain more if they DO rather than just read or discuss.