Animoto

The latest Web 2.0 tool that i tried our was Animoto. Animoto is a simple web tool that makes a short video of uploaded pictures or short video clips. It is easy to use and the finished product looks very professional. You can share, link, embed, and/or upload your final product. I made a couple of videos which did not take much time at all and looked pretty good. In its free version the videos are short, only thirty seconds, so you are not likely to make the next Hollywood blockbuster and even as a way to share vacation photos or event photos, 30 seconds does not allow for many to be shown. However, "Pro" pricing is pretty cheap and there are both individual educator plans and school plans which are even more reasonable. If you take a lot of photos, Animoto would be a great tool to use to do something with them to share.

The best things about Animoto are that it is intuitive  and the finished product looks amazingly good for the amount of work that is required. It would be a great tool for younger kids or people with limited tech skills so that they could produce a short clip. It could also work as a stepping stone assignment to teach skills needed for a more involved movie project. It might be an alternative assignment for a student for whom making a whole movie from scratch was too difficult, for example a special education student in an inclusive educational setting could make an Animoto video whereas his peers might make an iMovie. I am going to encourage my students this fall to take pictures during their first week of school and we will use them to make short Animoto videos for them to share with friends and family and post on our website.

Enhanced Podcast

Our final project was to design a short enhanced podcast in iMovie. Overall I found this project to be much more challenging than anticipated. I am not a Mac user so this one one hurdle for me, even the delete key works differently on a Mac. iMovie is fairly intuitive but as with any complex program there is, or at least was in my case, a pretty steep learning curve. Among the many pitfalls I encountered were accidentally deleting an audio track, entering captions that did not save, not understanding why some recorded voice-over followed with a specific image while  other voice-overs the recording continued until stopped, and figuring out how to easily preview segments of the video without watching the whole thing from the start. I met most of these challenges, but not without a fair amount of effort. I will let you be the judge of how successful I was.

In order for me to have a movie making assignment in my classroom, I would need to watch many more instructional videos and practice making a few more movies. I encountered frustrations and I expect that some of my students would struggle with many more. Of course, others would do much better right from the start. I could an iMovie as a project to follow one in which students prepared  a PowerPoint presentation and another that required a screen-cast. The PowerPoint would help establish the concept of and practice with planning a presentation. The screen-cast would provide them practice with narration. A movie combines the two. I could also simplify the project a bit by having students use pictures that they had already take of friends,  family, etc., and make it more a video to tell about themselves rather than on some more complicated topic.