Students Can Make a Hand Drawn Animation Using Google!

art by Natalie

I gotta be honest...I was extraordinarily excited when I finally figured out how to make this project work. I felt like a scientist who discovered an unknown planet in the solar system.  I already knew how to create animated cartoons in Google Slides with a sort of stop motion technique and had used this project with several 5th grade classes, but we were, of course, using the creative work of others to do it.  We were animating other people’s characters.  Then I discovered the Canvas app, a hidden gem in Chrome, which has simple drawing tools and is perfect for the touchscreen Chromebook.  The final puzzle piece was a fabulous art teacher named Melissa Downs, who was interested in bringing technology into her classroom. It was serendipity, and here is the project so you can try it in your classroom. 

Here's an example of the final product.  Swimming fish, hand drawn by Mrs. Downs. :-)

Kinda mind-blowing, right?  And I bet you can’t wait to make one; so here are the basic directions.  The art teacher provides the instruction for the drawing portion, and the technology teacher provides the instruction to make the animation function. Our collaboration plays on our individual strengths while inviting us each to be more artistic, more technically skilled, and more creative.

We did this project with every second grader at our school, Christiansburg Primary School, in Christiansburg, Virginia.  The time needed for the project: three classroom sessions of 45 minutes each.  During the first class, the students learn to feel comfortable with the drawing tools by experimentation and play, and then we move into demonstrating how to draw the background. The second session we draw the sea creature on a transparent background, save our drawings so they are accessible in Slides, and then move into the animation part, which happens in Slides.  We found that creating a 3-step chant to remember the pattern helped students with the project. "Click on the slide, Control D, move the fish; click on the slide, Control D, move the fish." etc.  For the third class, we published our sideshows, thus animating them, and then students "turned them in" to the teacher by copying and pasting the link into a shared Google Sheet.  For a single class, Google Classroom would have worked better for this, but since we had eight classes, the spreadsheet was a more efficient way to collect links.

The second grade students were ALL successful in creating the project!  And we felt delighted about that. Mrs. Downs invited a few students who needed a little extra help to come to the art room during classroom morning time, and this was just the perfect little boost to make sure that each child created their own final product. We published the final version on Mrs. Down's Art page and linked them on the schools website. The students got to enjoy a day of sharing in art where their work was showcased on the smartboard.