When I’m teaching, I always try to find suitable visual aids to help my students picture the concept or topic we’re learning about. Often, I can find images online which are kind of what I’m after, but it’s never quite what I have in my head.

Well, using my Skriva stylus and the Keynote app, I’m able to create my own diagrams and images. But better still, I can animate them too!

For example, take this diagram that I’ve drawn of a plant conducting photosynthesis. I’ve got the key elements drawn, but I want to illustrate that the plant absorbs carbon dioxide and releases oxygen back into the atmosphere. To do that, I’m going to animate some little gas particles being absorbed into the plant and then released afterwards.

I’ve already locked all of my existing drawings on the page, which means that when I tap my Skriva stylus on the screen now, it’ll bring up drawing tools, and it’ll let me draw a quick carbon dioxide molecule that doesn’t interact with other things on the page. That means when I press ‘Done’, I can tap onto just that single molecule and copy and paste it to make a few copies. I’ll arrange them around the whole diagram to show that the gas is being absorbed in the air all around that plant.

The clever part comes next. I’m going to tap onto my first molecule and then select ‘Animate’ from the floating toolbar. I can now tap on ‘Add Action’ in the middle and then select ‘Motion Path’.

Now, using my Skriva stylus once more, I can draw the path that I want my molecule to take on its way to being absorbed by the leaves of the plant. Simply drawing that on the screen will create that motion path for me. Then, I can simply tap onto the next carbon dioxide molecule and repeat that process again.

And then, through the magic of editing, I end up with something that looks a little bit like this—it’s pretty cool!

So that’s halfway there. Now I need to draw the corresponding oxygen particles that are being released by the plant. I’ll follow the exact same process again by tapping onto the screen and drawing one of them. I’ll fill in the background white this time to make it stand out a bit more, and then when I press ‘Done’, I can copy and paste some more.

I can then add that same animation again by tapping onto one of my particles and picking ‘Animate’ from the toolbar. Here, once more, I’ll select ‘Add Action’ and then draw a motion path. But this time, the gas molecule is going to move away from the leaf and into the air.

Once I’ve done this for each of my molecules, I can then add one last finishing touch by selecting my original drawing of the plant, unlocking it, and then using the ‘Format’ button at the top of the screen to change the layer order and bring the plant to the very front. That means when I press ‘Play’ in Keynote, you can see the carbon dioxide being absorbed into the leaves and the plant releasing oxygen back into the atmosphere, with all of those molecules disappearing into the plant – perfect!

And if I wanted to take this one step further, I could actually tap on the document name at the top, press ‘Export’, and then save this animation. I could choose to save it as a movie or a GIF. I’ll go for an animated GIF here.

Once I’ve chosen ‘Animated GIF’, I can make sure it’s a large-size image, it’s good quality, and then I can simply save it straight into the Photos app. Now, I can share that graphic wherever I like – perhaps onto Showbie or Google Classroom – to ensure that my students can easily visualise the topic we’re learning about.