Get creative with path animation

Animating things is fun! Use student's excitement to engage them in learning content, building writing skills, and more.

For enhanced storytelling

Adding path animation to stories they are retelling can help students demonstrate comprehension and make deeper connections to texts. For example, ask older students to create animated retellings of common stories for younger students to read or use the Team feature to partner older and younger students together to animate an original story or nursery rhyme. 



Adding animation after writing a personification story is a fun way to bring it to life. 

You can also use animation to support students during the process of writing a personification story. Once students choose the object they want to animate, simply animating the object on a page can help struggling writers see, and even feel, what is happening to the object. 



Encourage your struggling writers to use the dictation tools in a text object to tell their story and let Wixie do the actual typing.

For enhanced explanations

The National Academy of Science suggests that students should be given opportunities to make presentations of their work and "engage with their classmates in explaining, clarifying, and justifying what they have learned." Animation is perfect for supporting this learning environment.

When students animate digital processes, instead of just memorizing answers, they create their own meaningful connections with the content. This is especially helpful with microscopic processes like cell division and macroscopic processes, like celestial movement.



Procedural writing is a specific type of explanation that shares a specific set of steps necessary to accomplish a goal. Use animation to help students convey actions more easily and visualize ways to make their text and verbal descriptions more accurate.




For enhanced understanding

Animation isn’t just fun; it can be a powerful learning tool. To help her elementary students identify verbs, Texas educator Amy Clark had her students create a "verbs are words that move" animation project. After choosing a verb and animating it, students also came up with a fancy word, or synonym, for the verb.



Even young students can use path animation to enhance simple stories. Read Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner to inspire your emerging readers and writers. Then, ask students to write a two-word sentence that simply adds a verb after the word snowman, such as Snowmen skydive. 

Have students start a blank project, add a background for context and then draw their snowman doing this activity. Select the snowman in action and convert to a sticker. Then use the path animation options to bring its actions to life!



These opportunities for multimodal expression engage students by providing them with an opportunity to be active and social as they discuss, plan, and execute a project.

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