Teacher made GIFs as teaching aids can introduce lessons with pictures taken through continuous mode

The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is now much in use in social media in the form of animated visual comments and good wishes for various life events.

The GIF is basically a bitmap image format that was developed by the CompuServe team led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite which is now very popular on various social media platforms.

Educational use:My experience

However, the silent animated micro-videos can be made by teachers easily from the pictures of line drawing taken in successive stages to illustrate some processes.

But, it has been seen that teacher fight shy in use of GIF mode of photograph editing available in many.

I tried my hand on continuous shots of smoke and converted into a GIF and used to open the lesson on 'diffusion' in physics which enlivened the lesson.

"A complex one sentence commentary of 10-20 words can be used as an entry stage to the lesson along with a GIF," I had said during a training session on teaching aids.

For example, with the inset GIF, it was stated, "In this GIF, the gaseous smoke particles are agitated and moving in different directions in the air, and such a phenomenon is called diffusion."

And, the science lesson at the middle school stage clicked.