A Quick but Important Blackboard Lesson
For my next activity in the Experimenter module, I thought I’d tackle A Serious Use for Silly Media and create a GIF! I use GIFs daily but always in casual messaging and for the purpose of conveying emotion and evoking smiles only. I’ve never used it as an education tool so the challenge was on. This was also the activity I thought I would try to complete using my phone (a suggestion in the module criteria) because giphy.com actually has an app, and I thought it would be pretty straightforward. Epic fail! I got completely frustrated on my phone only to find out that it’s not even possible to create the kind of GIF I wanted to on the app. I was able to create it really easily using my laptop, but it was certainly a great reminder to always consider limitations when designing activities in online spaces!
One downside of a slideshow GIF (that I also learned the hard way) is that because of its constant looping, it can make it challenging to know what image is the start/end image, which can mess up your story! So, I threw in a “The End” slide to hopefully make it more clear. Here is my GIF – a quick Blackboard lesson on why it’s important to use Student Preview mode when designing your online course.
TweetExample for "A Quick but Important Blackboard Lesson":
https://giphy.com/gifs/AscuiH89KZT1z96Pwg