It's the beginning of the school year, and before I teach my advanced students their theory lessons, they need to review the names of the notes on the Treble and Bass Clef staffs. That's simple enough, I could just upload some images of notes into Kahoot for my students to look at and answer. As usual though, I got some crazy idea to make it a little bit more interesting.
I wanted to create a little bit of tension with my students when the question popped onto the screen. Each question would start with blank staff, and then students would see a note drawn on a particular line or space of the music staff. A static image wouldn't do this for me, but an animated gif would. I did some detective work, and sure enough, Kahoot supports animated gifs :-)
So, I needed to figure out a way to create an animated gif of me drawing a note on a music staff. Thankfully, the team that created Office Mix recently created a new tool called Snip that enabled me to get the job done. Snip turns my Surface's screen into a recordable whiteboard (although, it's not white). After starting the capture process, I can annotate on my screen and then save the capture as a .mp4 video file. That's pretty cool. I needed a nice big music staff to draw my notes on. No problem, I have StaffPad.
Using StaffPad as a backdrop, I quickly recorded myself with Snip drawing various notes on the Bass and Treble Clef. The process was pretty simple. Watch the video below to see how it worked.
I watched some tutorials, figured out the process, and I was set. Using Photoshop I was able to import the videos and export them as animated gifs. I uploaded them into Kahoot, created my assessment quiz, and I was good to go.
Snip is pretty cool, and has a bunch more features as well (audio recording!). I can see myself in the future using the same process to create quick theory examples that I can throw into a Sway and share with my students.