If a picture is worth a thousand words, is a 5 second gif worth five thousand words?
We're studying inertia in our 8th Grade Physical Science class and the teacher showed this demonstration. I don't need to explain it because it's right here.
This is pretty simple. Afterwards, the students were asked to write out their observations and create a diagram showing the forces at work in this scenario. The teacher performed the demonstration a few times; some of the students needed to see it again. ...and again. Tying the concepts of inertia, friction, and force to a real example is tough for any student, let alone an 8th grader in the spring time. This creates a a problem that a gif can help fix.
The gif format can be embedded into a PowerPoint or a class website and allows the students to observe the demonstration as many times as they want. This can be valuable for those students who want to review it again or for those students who missed the demonstration.
I used my iPhone and an app called 5SecondsApp that creates gif files from video. It's free and moderately easy to use. Plus it has the capability of syncing with DropBox. Like Instagram, you can add filters and play with the video as much as you want; I don't know how valuable that is, but it's neat. I didn't use a filter for this video.
And, using the gif-maker you can see what we did in class today. That, in itself, is worth five thousand words.
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