I've been going a little crazy sharing the animoto videos my son Sidhanth and I whipped up in a matter of minutes (that's what's so cool about animoto) a couple of days ago. I put them up here (see the last few posts), on educatorslog.in, on classtroom 2.0, as well as my facebook profile! When you stumble upon a good thing, SHARE IT, I say!
Receiving family videos made by my sister soon after I posted mine was such a thrill! Anyway, the best news at the end of all this came in an email from Rebecca Brooks of Animoto...they have just launched Animoto for Education whereby they're offering FULL-ACCESS to educators (the free version restricts videos to 30 secs)!
Which brings us to the use of Animoto videos in the classroom. How could teachers use this tool? It would be a neat way to introduce a new unit with a snapshot of all that a teacher intends to cover. Videos made by students could be part of culminating activities at the end of a unit. It's a great way to capture a field trip or a workshop or an event or the highlights of an academic year to put up on a school website, teacher or student blog.
Since the videos are so fast paced, I guess they cannot really replace traditional slideshows for teaching even if the background music did have a voice-over by a teacher or student. The great thing is the no-entry-level-skill-barrier which means that kids as young as 7 or 8 could put these together, or teachers who are not too tech-savvy, and would otherwise never venture out to make videos or even slideshows.
4 comments:
nice post shuchi. Animoto is cool.
Thanks, Sukumar :)
Hope all is well with you and Sastwingees...Last I visited there was a lot of history being written about. Am curious to know how many people post on that blog...
Hi Good post Shuchi :)
But the major problem for this would be low level comp knowledge by the teachers.
Thanks, Amar.
I think the great thing about Animoto is that is that it does not need much more than a low level comp knowledge by teachers.
Compare it to anything else out there to put together images with sound and some snazzy transitions to give it a good movie-like effect...Even powerpoint probably requires a higher level of knowledge of the app to put images with sound and appropriate transitions!
All this requires is a bunch of images. Yes, a teacher would know how to select the image files in the upload part, and then navigate the next step to select a piece of music ... That would be the required minimum level of tech or rather "net"-savviness required to make such a movie.
But this could be achieved within a 5-min demo as well if teachers were not up to it. Can't say that of many other apps, would you agree?
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