Using Google Suite Tools for Stop Motion Animation

If your district has adopted Google for Education then you might be looking for new and innovative ways to use these tools. I was at a Google Summit this weekend and learned this neat trick for creating stop motion animation. I know my students will love this!

You need access to Google Keep and Google Photos to make this work but if your students have G Suite then they should have access to these. By the way have you ever used Google Keep? I use it every week for my grocery list and it’s shared with my hubster because he does the shopping. I love that if I forgot something I can add it to the list and he gets the updated list in real time so I don’t have to send him 50 million texts with the things I forgot to add to the list.

Okay back to stop motion animation….

DISCLAIMER: Before we get started, please take note….my artistic skills are severely lacking so please don’t laugh at me! I thought about telling you that one of my kids made the animation but decided to keep it real.

Steps for Creating Stop Motion Animation Using Google Keep and Photos:

It might seem a little involved at first but once you make a couple of these it really takes no time at all.

Step 1:

Open up your menu on the right hand side of your chrome browser. Then click on the Google Keep app. If it doesn’t appear there then go to the address bar and type in keep.google.com.

Step 2:

Once Google Keep opens up you will see the option to take a note. Click on the pen icon, “New Note With Drawing”.

Step 3:

The drawing applet will open up and you can see the drawing tools. There are a couple of pen options as well as a highlighter, eraser and cropping tool.

Step 4:

Step 5:

Step 6:

When your picture is complete you need to download the image and save it to Google Photos.

Step 7:

Step 8:

Go back to Google Keep and use the cropping tool so that you can create the stop motion animation.

Step 9:

Move the image that you just cropped to its new location. Depending on how many images you want to make you might want to only move the cropped image a small amount. It really depends on what you want your animation story to look like. Once you move the cropped image then you need to repeat Steps 6,7 and 8 until you have all of the images that you need (to a maximum of 50).