Although incredibly popular in the nineties animated GIF's seemed to disappear from the web for a lengthy period of time once YouTube hit the scene.  But they are back with a vengeance of late.

For the uninitiated an animated GIF is just an image that plays like a short movie up to 10 seconds long.  (See demo on left.)

The process of making an animated GIF used to be time consuming and difficult but now it cannot get much simpler.

gifyoutube.com will convert any YouTube clip in to an animated Gif in seconds with just a few keystrokes.  All you need to do is visit your YouTube clip you want and then add GIF to the start of the web address such as this http://gifyoutube.com/yourmovie and you will be transported to the GIF editor.

Alternately you can just visit gifyoutube.com and go from there.

Either way it's plenty of fun and doesn't get much easier than this.  Your students may wish to crate some animated GIF's to place in presentations or websites and this is just the tool for it.