This year’s theme of the MACUL Conference is, “Unboxing Education,” and it calls to encourage participants to imagine, innovate, and inspire. Every year at MACUL, we try to do something fun — and dare we say innovative — at our booth. We always hope that the interactive twist we put on a standard booth’s experience inspires new ideas for teaching and learning. So, to embrace the conference theme this year, we chose to focus on the GIFs of imagination.
With a little imagination, there are a lot of ways to repurpose GIFs for teaching and learning. Some of the key affordances of GIFs are that they can capture motion, processes, and cycles. They can reveal how things work (or don’t work!). They can be leveraged for comparing and contrasting. The looping nature of GIFS allows for whatever is being presented to continually reinforce concepts. Also, to create a GIF as a learner, you have to understand how to break down the parts of the whole of the content in order to create a GIF that makes sense. Here are some examples of how you might use them to support your learners in the content area.
Critical Ed Tech Tip: We like to use sites like ezgif.com with learners because of their Privacy Policy, lack of a public gallery, and their data storage/deletion practices.