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Student Friendly Animated Gifs for Classroom Use

Student Friendly Animated Gifs for Classroom Use

Student Friendly Animated Gifs for the Classroom

Gifs4Kids is a new online resource for teachers and students that is aggregating student friendly animated gifs to be used in projects. Popular sites like Giphy, Gfycat, etc. contain gifs that are not appropriate for children. Therefore, Gifs4Kids is an amazing and SAFE resource for educators and students!

The creators, Erin West (I KNOW her!šŸ˜‚) and Todd DeSando, of this student friendly tool are wanting to grow their library of gifs and are accepting submissions that can be entered on their GIF Submission Form

So far this search tool supports 12 different languages and more are on the way! They are also working on adding:
  • Chrome extension for drag and drop usage of GIFs
  • Repository of GIF-based classroom activities
  • Instructional videos and resources that demonstrate how to create/ use GIFs and instructional best practices (YouTube Channel)
  • #GIFEdChat

How Can Gifs Be Used in the Classroom?


Kids LOVE gifs. Heck, adults LOVE gifs! Therefore, let's figure out some creative ways we can use them in the classroom!

1. Sam Carpenter started the hashtage #GIFVocab in which you can explore different gifs that have been matched up with vocabulary words. Students can search for gifs that help bring their vocabulary words to life! Gifs can easily be inserted into Google Slides presentations. Check out how easy it is to do this to support vocabulary knowledge. When I made a slide for the word ecstatic the search engine did not return a gif for the vocabulary term so I was challenged to use synonyms to find an appropriate gif. This provides a great learning opportunity for all students.

Note: I just learned the switch tabs trick in June when I was looking over the shoulder of a 4th graderšŸ˜‹

2. Students could find gifs that represent synonyms and antonyms.

3. Creating a collection of animated gifs to represent adjectives would be a fun way to spice up a unit on parts of speech.

4. Students could report traits and feelings of characters in stories they read by finding gifs and posting them in Google Classroom:



5. Writing prompts/generators- gifs can help spark lots of different writing ideas

6. Exit card-ask students to find a gif and post it to a Padlet wall that expresses how they feel about what they learned that day


 Student Created Gifs

Students can even create their own gifs. Back in 2015 I blogged about students creating gifs of the different moon phases using Gifmaker.me. There are so many different tools available for gif creation. Erin and Todd linked to the AndthenIwaslike gif maker that is very easy to use. Richard Byrne from Free Technology for Teachers recently blogged about using the free tool, Brush Ninja, to get students creating gifs. So many great options!

I'm so excited about this new prescreened gif tool for students. A huge thank you goes to Erin and Todd for all of the work they are putting into this resource. How else could we use animated gifs in the classroom? Let me know in the comments below!

 Related Posts:

If you like gifs, then be sure to check out my Turn Yourself into an Animated Emoji post in which you can learn how to create an animated avatar gif!
Students can now find child friendly animated gifs in a safe search environment using Gif4Kids. They can add gifs to all sorts of projects!

Follow me on Pinterest to get more techie ideas: