Saturday, January 19, 2013

Animoto

This is my first attempt at using a Web 2.0 tool.  I decided to use Animoto because I have seen other teachers at Loyola Blakefield use it to make videos of all kinds of things.  Animoto is described on the website as “..the most beautiful way to share your photos & videos.  Easy as pie.”  It’s pretty simple to use and after you sign up there is a brief tutorial about how to use Animoto.  They also have a help section on the website that has additional resources and answers to common FAQ’s.  You can sign up for a free account, which allows you to create 30-second videos using a few of their themes and songs.  You can then add your own photos, videos, captions and text to create your video.  There are options to upgrade your account for a fee.  Some of the features of the paid accounts include unlimited video length, more song and theme choices, the ability to upgrade your video to HD and the ability to download your video and save it to your computer.  The free and paid versions allow you to share your videos online through many sites such as Facebook, Twitter, email, Blogger and many more.

For my example I stuck with the free account and used pictures of my daughter smiling.

Animoto would be a good way for students to show something about their life, where they live or maybe even a vacation they have taken to their classmates or even used in a telecollaborative project with a class in a different part of the country or world.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing some of the pitfalls (during your class demonstration) of using Animoto. It seems Animoto is a great way to quickly create a video, add themes, music etc, but in reality some more advanced features are not available. This might be a great starting point for students, but for more in depth projects students and teachers might want to use a better video application.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Have you thought about what would be the benefits to using this site over iMovie? They seem to have similar features. The one benefit I can see is that this being a web 2.0 tool could have access to many other users, other than just users who have a Mac and iMovie.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I did. And I see what your thinking. Animoto is a one stop shop for creating and sharing videos and makes it easy for someone with little to no experience with video creation make something useful. Where I see the benefit of using iMovie, Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere is if you want to be able to do more that what something like Animoto can do. You can still share your video with your class using YouTube, Vimeo or other sites like it that will have the Web 2.0 features of commenting and sharing. Animoto is free, unless you want to do more, and the other programs I mentioned are expensive. Each has their pluses and minus, so I guess it depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

      Thanks for commenting.

      Delete