3 Ways to Incorporate GIFs in Class Projects

If you've spent any time on BuzzFeed, you probably know that animated GIFs are quite popular among the millennial set. An assignment (perhaps web-based) incorporating GIFs can be an engaging way for students to connect with the book they are reading, the historical event they are studying, or the scientific concept they are learning about.

BuzzFeed accepts Community Posts here, in case you want to put a little more on the line by providing an Internet audience for your students (they don't need to post under their real name).

Depending on how involved you would like your GIF project to be, and what the technical skills and goals of the course are, here are 3 varying degrees of projects using GIFs:


1. The Quick, Dirty and Low-Tech Approach

Use pre-made GIFs to tell a story.

Students can collect GIFs from sites like giphy.com for pop culture-oriented GIFs, or gifs.net or gifgifs.com for something more general (and a bit of vintage web 1.0 style).

From there, they can use the GIFs to relate a narrative or a concept.

Here is an example that may be used for an Intro to Astronomy course: 

Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet in our Solar System.

Its mass is more than 2.5 times that of all the other planets of the Solar System combined.

Three Earths can fit inside its Giant Red Spot.

As another example, The NY Daily News retold Wuthering Heights (in a pretty snarky way) here on their Books Blog "Page Views".

2. The More-Involved and More-Technical Assignment

Use online tools to create GIFs. 

There are many in-browser web options for creating GIFs or for editing existing ones.

If, for example, the student wants to have text on all of her GIFs in the sequence above, she can use MemeCenter's GIF Maker to add text to the existing GIFs she found on Giphy:

MemeCenter will also let users draw on top of the GIFs they are creating, or use a blank page to create a GIF from drawing and text, which is a nice feature.  

GifMaker.me, MakeAGif, Picasion, ImgFlip and other sites, let users collect images to create a GIF.

MakeAGif, Giflike, and GifYouTube make it very easy to bring YouTube videos into animated GIFs. MakeAGif also lets you bring in video from your own computer or from your webcam.

If you are on a Mac and are willing to pay $5, you can also use GIFBrewery. Buzzfeed has a tutorial for its use here.

3. Create Entirely New GIFs for a Creative and Long-Term Assignment

Use Photoshop to make GIFs.

If you have some skilled students in your class and give them a GIF assignment, they may jump to Photoshop themselves, but this can prove to be much more time-consuming and may not be ideal for every project or every student.

Making GIFs in Photoshop can be a great assignment for advanced students in Art, Design, or Web courses, who will be learning skills by doing and also be interpreting a project through narrative.

To bring videos into Photoshop, you are going to want to Import Video Frames to Layers. Here is a good tutorial using screenshots, and here is a good video to get you up to speed.

Maybe you are teaching a cinema course on tragic heroes and are teaching both Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street and Kubrick's Barry Lyndon (and my dream film prof!). One of your students may want to draw comparisons between the two protagonists in these films and produce GIFs that look like this:

To create GIFs without a video in Photoshop is similar — you will be converting layers into frames of animation. Here is a PDF that explains the process, and here is a video.

Using Photoshop, the students will not be limited in what they can create as they would be if they only use pre-made GIFs. Skilled users of Photoshop will be able to do very interesting things, and maybe even create GIF art, which is becoming increasingly popular among multimedia artists.

Some examples of GIFs created for specific projects are available on Buzzfeed — this Harry Potter example may be good for students of design, while this one bringing The Hunger Games, Dr. Who, and Harry Potter together may be suitable for Literature, Film, and Media Studies students alike.

In general, I think of this project as a Writing Across the Curriculum assignment as it is a great place to explain narrative or concepts through text and imagery. In the case of writing on top of GIFs themselves, it can be difficult to be succinct while still coherent and clear. For students who may write under GIFs, it will be interesting to see how they collect and order GIFs and piece them together through words. This can also produce funny results, leading the students to really engage with the subject matter at hand. Also, an animated GIF project can be supplemented with a traditional essay, of course!

If you are on the fence about the academic merit on GIFs, you may consider looking at the historical work being done to digitize Stereoviews as tweened GIFs. And also see how GIFs can tell a self-contained story to convey information in a quick way.

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