It’s *always* a teacher, isn’t it? ☺️
Thanks so much, Cheryl! I love to use activities like this to give students an opportunity to show their understanding and content knowledge — and with lots of choice and options to personalise!
I love Geography. I had a wonderful Geography teacher who instilled in me a love for the subject and a curiosity about our physical landscape.
But, it is often difficult for learners to visualise the slow movement of tectonic plates, the processes beneath the crust or the forces at work along plate boundaries from static images and textbooks alone.
Animation with Keynote for iPad has transformed how my students can engage with and learn about these geographic concepts.
This activity allows us to bring geographic landforms and processes to life in the classroom, whilst simultaneously allowing students to develop key digital skills.
In this lesson, students demonstrated an understanding of continental drift in Geography class by creating an animated video using Keynote for iPad.
Learning Objectives for this lesson:
Drawing and animation with Keynote for iPad allowed students to demonstrate a key geographic concept in a more creative way. The ability to show the movement of tectonic plates is only possible using animation. The combination of drawing, animation, voiceover and video challenged students to show understanding in a multimodal format.
Students demonstrated their learning by:
Part 1 — Draw the continents
To trick with this animation is to start by working backwards:
Part 2 — Duplicate and animate
When prompted, don’t duplicate the slide. You already have both of the slides you need: slide 1 (Pangaea) which will move to slide 2 (the continents we know today) using a Magic Move Transition.
Part 3 — Create a video with voiceover
(Alternatively, turn on the mic and add the voiceover as you create the screen recording)
If you would like to try it out and skip straight to the animation, I have attached a Keynote document with one slide completed. This includes all of the continents, drawn and separated. Then continue from the 7th step above (‘Duplicate the slide’).
This lesson formed part of my Apple Teacher Portfolio as an ‘Apply’ lesson, but could be easily adapted and used as an ‘Explore’ lesson depending on the age, skill level, positioning and depth of the activity. There are opportunities for the lesson to be simplified or shortened (i.e. leave out the voiceover part) or for extension activities.
I used this activity with my 1st Year Geography class (12-13 years old), but it could easily be used in different contexts with other age groups too!
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All Comments
It’s *always* a teacher, isn’t it? ☺️
Thanks so much, Cheryl! I love to use activities like this to give students an opportunity to show their understanding and content knowledge — and with lots of choice and options to personalise!
Really well done! Thank you for sharing.
Thank you so much, KipK!
Always happy to share my resources and, hopefully, others find them helpful and useful in the classroom with their students!
This is amazing! Thanks for sharing. How long did it take for you to create?
Thank you, JJ!
It’s pretty quick for me make or even demo live in class for students — I can do a rough version in about 5-10 minutes.
But, with students, timing will vary a lot depending on a number of factors:
So, it might vary from anywhere between 20 minutes to closer to an hour depending on these factors.
Using the template (attached above) and a simple screen recording with voiceover at the same time would considerably cut down on the time needed.
However, this year, I got my new 1st Year students to do it all — from drawing, animating, screen recording and adding voiceover and a soundtrack in iMovie — as I wanted them to learn these key productivity and creation skills, which were new to them all. Which was great, because they were constantly engaging with the subject content throughout the process.
This is fantastic! Bookmark for later for sure!
Thanks so much, Hannamarie!
I hope you find it useful with your students!
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Posted on November 03, 2022
I was wondering where you got your geography passion Eoin - of course, a teacher! This is such a creative project that assesses the content knowledge so well. I love how you outline the Keynote skills that students can easily follow and that the learners then have two ways to do voice overs. I wish I was in your class!