Third graders at Holladay Elementary have been studying simple machines (SOL3.2), so today students in Ms. Middleton’s and Ms. Edelblut’s classes created animations to show how different simple machines work. I posted a similar lesson a couple of years ago here, but I did a couple of things differently this time that I wanted to share with you. In Ms. Edelblut’s class, we used ABCYa!Animate and added a real photo for the background. First we did a Google image search for a background photo, then on ABCYa! we clicked the “Edit background” button and chose “Import photo.” It added a cool effect to the animations. You can see some student samples here. In Ms. Middleton’s class we used a different site I just discovered called ParaPara. It’s much simpler than ABCYa!Animate, but you have to draw everything, and there is no copy button, so you have to redraw your picture for every frame. For that reason I advised the students to keep their drawings very simple. The final animation isn’t saved as a .gif file either, but you can view them online. Several students were able to make two or three animations! You can see Ms. Middleton’s animations here .
