 I'm going to show you a really cool website that can take your students' drawings and animate them. And then what we're going to do is make a little video of your students' characters that they drew and make an animated GIF out of it so they can put it into a document, a slide deck, any project that they're working on, all for free. This is very cool. So if you go to sketch.metademolab.com, you would get to this website. And as long as you have a drawing like this one that has a white background so it doesn't have anything drawn in the background and then has their character drawn, you can use it. So I'm going to click the get started button. And right over here is the checklist of things that you have to have. Basically a background that's white, a drawing that's clear. So I'm going to go ahead and upload a drawing that I have from my device. And then there's my critter that I've drawn. I'm going to make sure it looks like the right one. Yep, it does. I'm going to click the next button. It's going to scan it. Now you can help this website do research, but with your kiddos, I would just say disagree. Just get right past that. And now you're going to pick the canvas. So you want to make sure that your guy, your little drawing is completely within this border. So like I can see his toes over here a little close. I'm going to drag that down just a little bit. He's inside here. Everything looks good. I'm going to click the next button. And then it's going to say, did we draw the outlines? Correct. So you kind of follow along your little critter here. Yep, everything's good. The black is the background. I can see all of the parts of my character. If you need to redo it, you can edit with a pen and retry again. But mine came out perfectly. Most of them will. They'll come out just fine. Click the next button. And now you're going to put in where all of the joints are, where the movement's going to happen. So you make sure the eyes here are where they need to be. And then here's the right ear, the left ear, the nose, the head center. And then right here is a right shoulder. Well, you can see I need to bring my shoulder up and bring this shoulder up. And this guy doesn't have a second arm here. But this elbow right here maybe needs to go a little bit. And that's the wrist I'm going to put right about there. Here's a knee. Move that a little bit. And this knee a little bit. Here's the hip. I'm going to move that up just a tiny little bit just so it kind of centers a little more. Here's the ankle. I need to move that over a little bit so it's on the ankles. So everything looks good there. You might have to move some of those dots around, make sure it looks good. Hit the next button. And it's going to make your animated character. How cool is that? It just took my drawing and made it do these actions. So over on the left hand side, you have all of these to choose from. So maybe I want mine to just run across the screen or do these little jumping jacks. Whatever it is you choose, that's great. You make your decision. So I think everything looks good. Now here's where you have to use a second tool, because you can share this and what it ends up being is just a web link. You can't really put it into a document. You just get a link to do it. I want to be able to put my little character in something, in a slide deck or something like that. So you're going to have to use a second tool. Some kind of video recording tool and ScreenCastify is totally free. So I'm going to open up my ScreenCastify. I'm going to make sure my microphone and my webcam are turned off. And I'm going to hit record. Make sure my mouse is off of the screen where my character's at. And I'm just going to let this record a loop for a little while, like 15 seconds or so. It doesn't matter about sound because gifs don't have any sound. So I'm just going to let them do a little thing for a minute. And then I'm going to stop it. ScreenCastify will open up. Now I have a video but I have this whole screen now and that kind of defeats the purpose. I don't want to share this character, this really cool character, with all of this stuff on the side. So if I open the editor right up here at the top, select my video right down here at the bottom and I go to the crop button over here on the left. What that's going to let me do is cut away all of the stuff that I don't want. So I don't need all of this extra video stuff. I just want to see my little character here move. That's perfect. Make sure if your character's running across the screen, you may need to do the whole screen this way. Now mine's just going to kind of do a little shake here in the middle. So I'm just going to make it just big enough so that he's in there. But like I said, if he's running across the screen or doing a lot more movement, you're going to want to check to make sure he's in there. So I'm going to hit the done button and you can do a demo just to make sure, yep, my guy is perfectly set. I'm going to go up here to the right where it says export, click the export and I'm going to export it back to screencastify. Now if I just wanted a video, I can just hit export MP4. That's fine, you get a video. But I want to make a GIF and screencastify lets me do that. So I'm going to go down here where it says export to screencastify. I'm going to click on it. I'm going to name this thing my monster dance. Click the save button. It's going to open back up in screencastify. So here's my video and remember this is a video. I can't put this in a document. I could put it in a slide. I could share it with a web link. I could play it as a video, but remember I wanted a GIF so I can put it in a slide deck or anything and it doesn't have any audio, it just plays. So now all I have to do is go down to this bottom section in screencastify where it says export video. Do the drop down. You have other options, but I want to put, click on export as a GIF. So export GIF. I can choose the size. Now the resolution size will also make it bigger and it gets harder to put places. Remember a GIF is just an animated picture. You don't want it too big because then it's a huge file to put into a document. So I'm just going to let it pick its normal size, what it chose. I'm going to hit export. It'll just take a minute down here in the right. When it's done, it says download GIF. When I click that download, it'll download to my device and I can, here's the best part about using a GIF like this. I can open up a document. Remember you can't put a video in a document. Here's the story about Ralph, my monster, Ralphie. I can take that GIF, drag it right into my document and it's now a playable image. So after they read all about Ralphie, they get to the bottom and they can see him as an animated GIF. You can also put that in a slide, in a Google drawing, in any kind of project you're doing. Videos are limited to certain file types. GIFs will go into anything. So this is a really, really simple way to make these student drawings or your drawings, your hand drawings, into a movable, almost lifelike image. All using a free tool. Get creative.