Animating vocabulary

I've just been looking at a useful websites called Gifup that enables users to quickly and easily create animated gifs / image sequences like the one below. This seems to me a like a really useful way of revising and teaching vocabulary.


What are the sports?

This is a gif that I created to revise some sport vocabulary. It took about 3 mins to make using images from Flickr.

Here's a tutorial movie showing how I made it. (1.2Mb swf)

It was very simple and just involved searching around my key topic and selecting a few images. Then a couple of clicks and the site generated my gif and gave me an 'embed code' to add it to the site. (See my previous tutorial to find out how to embed images and video into webpages on your desktop)

How to use this with students
Collect up gifs related to any vocabulary area you want to teach or revise. Embed them in an html page on your desk top and start a collection. Each time you add new ones send the html page to your students. (They will need to have a live connection on their computer to be able to view the gifs)
Ask them to make notes of any words they relate to the images they see.

What I liked about it

• It's quick and easy and there are lots of images available
• There are some really nice images
• It's great that you can embed the gifs into your materials

What I wasn't so sure about

• There are also some images which may be unsuitable for your students, so this is a resource for teachers to create materials rather than one to let students loose on
• I'm not sure what the copyright arrangement is with the images they are using
• Be careful about the speed that you set on your gifs, faster ones can be dangerous if anyone in your class is epileptic

On the whole Gifup isn't going to revolutionise your teaching, but it is a useful little tool that you can use to enhance thee teaching process. Please leave a comment if you have any other suggestions for how to use this.

Hope you enjoy it.

Best
Nik