Moving Beyond Slide Transitions and Presenting Bullets, One-by-One
When creating presentations in Keynote, adding transitions between slides can break up information, and adding builds to text and images can help with pace and structure. Our students know how to add these, but do they consider why, when, and how they should be used?
We won’t be answering that in this post—but you will learn how to use builds to create animated graphics.
Animating with Shapes and Graphics
We could continue to discuss the importance of having students consider their audience when presenting and how they are designing and animating their lessons. But what if we show them when they add in all the builds and transitions, they can create some really impressive animations. Yes, they could code these in a program like Scratch. But creating an animation in Keynote is another way to develop computational thinking, and with Keynote’s drawing tools there are more ways to personalize.
I started creating an animation in Keynote about the water cycle…
My initial animation was pretty simple, just a series of builds & actions all triggered by the previous one:
- Add the shapes (raindrops, lightning bolts, water and clouds)
- Resize & color the shapes as needed
- Place the raindrops in initial location
- Assign the lightning bolts the “pulse” action.
- Assign each raindrop the “move” action and make the lines go straight down
- The puddle is the water shape with a “wipe” build in.
- The raindrops use the “diffuse” build out to fade away.
Once I got that far, I started having fun and spent 15 minutes improving it. My goals were:
- Demonstrate that moisture in the air creates the clouds
- Have a second wave of raindrops fall
If you want to see my 15 minutes of work sped up to under 2 minutes… click here!
My final (for now!) of the rainfall during the water cycle looked like this:
Why should students do this?
Creating animation helps develop computational thinking as students (or anyone) try to problem solve to get their animation to display how they would like and show the information they are intending. Breaking down the steps necessary develops a student’s logic and problem-solving, two skills that are likewise involved in coding.
Once you start, it becomes something fun to tinker with. I imagine I will always keep adding to my Water Cycle/Storm animation because there is something addicting about continually working on it.