Over the past few years, animated GIF files have regained popularity in the virtual space, playing a significant role not only in social media but also in education. They have gained popularity among teachers and students, becoming important tools in the learning process. If you haven’t tried them in your practice yet, try to understand their hidden educational potential. When I wrote an article on how to use GIF animations in educational practice, I listed a number of services for creating GIF files. However, some of them require a separate description. Each of them has certain features. But perhaps the most impressive is the versatility and comprehensiveness of the platform, which allows you not only to create and convert GIFs, but also to edit finished GIF projects.
Ezgif is a wonderful online service for creating and editing high-quality GIF animations. You can create, edit, resize, crop, change the speed, convert, and optimize your GIF files, as well as apply a variety of interesting effects available in the library. The tool can convert various video formats to GIF files.
Remember, the service is completely free, no registration or account creation is required. However, don’t forget to save your projects when you’re done.
So, let’s highlight at least the main tools of Ezgif.
Online GIF maker
GIF Maker allows you to instantly create animated GIF files by combining individual image files as frames. The GIF files created are high quality and do not contain watermarks or other attributes, making this tool ideal for educational content creators.
To make a GIF, you can upload a sequence of images in GIF, JPG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, HEIC, AVIF, and other image formats. You can even upload a ZIP archive folder containing images and mix different image formats and sizes—they will be converted automatically. You can also upload animated GIF, WebP, or APNG images, which will be split and the delay time preserved. This means that GIF Maker can also be used to edit, shorten, or merge existing GIF files.
How do I edit a finished GIF?
Click the “Select Files” button and select a finished GIF animation, which you can split into frames and make your own adjustments. use as frames. This way, you can accompany a completely soulless animation with text.
Once you have created your new animation, you can adjust its speed and frame order before creating the GIF. After creating the GIF, you can resize, crop, and optimize it, or use any of the other tools we provide.
Converting video to GIF
Very often, we don’t need a long video to visualize learning. Sometimes a short clip that illustrates the specific phenomenon, event, or fact we need is much more effective. And we can not only cut the video, but also convert it into a GIF animation, accompanying it with additional information in the form of text or other objects. We can loop this animation so that what we want to draw attention to is repeated multiple times.
In Ezgif, you can convert videos of various formats up to 100 MB in size. Upload a video from your computer or paste the video URL. Then start processing. Don’t forget that you can add text to the animation you create.
If you have already tried this tool, you will have seen that creating educational GIF animations does not take much time. The main thing is to think through the content so that it fits into a clip lasting no more than 30 seconds. It is often difficult for us, as teachers, to learn to express our thoughts concisely. And it is very important to learn how to do this. Then we will understand that 30 seconds is a lot of time. And the educational projects we create will help visualize students’ thinking.
You can insert the GIF animations you create into your presentations, blogs, or websites. Or even use them separately.
