Keynote Fraction Animations

A really boring title I know, but this activity was lots of fun and was a great example of learning and understanding concepts rather than just knowing answers.

We are studying fractions in grade 6, in my experience students often know shortcuts and tricks to do equations with fractions

While this approach gives them an answer it doesn't promote understanding, rather it focuses on answers. I am much more interested in students understanding a concept rather than knowing an answer. Often they don't understand what the equations actually mean and written explanations are complicated and confusing.

There are lots of great visual examples online and sites like Myimaths have animations and videos explaining what is actually happening when you add, subtract, divide or multiply a fraction. While these sites promote understanding and make it easy for students to see what it means to solve equation problems, I prefer making my own or even better get the students creating their own fraction animations.

Keynote Fraction Animation

To achieve this we used Keynote and added actions to a variety of shapes and text boxes so that students could create their own fraction animations. About half way through the activity I remembered magic move and that made things so much easier.

Magic move compares one slide to the next, takes note of any changes and then animates the changes. You can easily duplicate a slide, make some changes and turn it into a nifty animation in no time at all.

Here are a series of videos I created on how to make your own fraction animations the first two use regular animations and the second two (multiplication and division use magic move)

Adding Fractions

Subtracting Fractions

Multiplying Fractions

Dividing Fractions

What I really like about this activity is that it is hard work, the students really need to think about what it means to perform operations on fractions. What does it mean to add fractions beyond a set of rules.

They look at fractions and operations in different ways, work backwards and need to problem solve to make their animations reflect what is actually happening when performing operations on fractions.

Make you own animations with Google Drawings and Photos

This is basically a tech updated version of the flipbooks I used to make when I was in school

The other day while working with some teachers we explored and started playing with using Google Drawings and photos so that students could create their own animations. Sure there are plenty of ways for students to create their own animated gifs but we thought it would be cool to try and do it Googley and it might be a bit easier than trying to use Scratch or something else.

We used Google Drawings to create our starting frame

Then we download the drawing as a jpeg

Then we went back to our Google Drawing and made a slight change to create our next frame.
Downloaded frame number 2

Made a change to the drawing
Downloaded frame number 3
Change
Download
Change
Download

this continued until we had created all our frames for our animation.

We tried to make changes uniform by using the checkbox guidelines that are in the background of a drawing

We added speech bubbles by using the shapes tool

We changed the colour of images by using the image option / recolour

To make the text boxes uniform, we first created one and set it up how we wanted, then we cut it, made a few changes / download jpeg / change etc and then pasted the text box back and changed the text. This was quicker than trying to remember the formatting and setting up up every time.

With a bit of creativity, you can make some really cool effects, even something as simple as moving objects to the back can make a huge difference.

Once all our frames were downloaded, they were conveniently saved and renumbered in our downloads folder.

To create our Gif, we dragged them into Google Photos on a Chrome browser to upload.

Once images are uploaded you get the option to create a new album, which we did.

We then selected all the images in order and used the + button to create a new animation

A new animation / Gif is created.

Once you have done it a few times, it is pretty easy and you can get really fast at it.

The animation in this video took less than 10 minutes from start to finish.

Have a go, or even better let your students have a go and get them creating.

It was lots of fun and the kids got the idea that all movies / animations are just a series of still images running together.