Animoto

I had a lot of fun playing around this summer with Animoto, a website where you import photos, then choose a theme and music and it creates a video for you.  Often flashy, always well designed and professional looking, I think there are a lot of uses in schools for this tool.

I plan to work with 5th and 6th graders to create 30-second book trailers later this year.

Forgive the repetitive loud music, but I wanted to start up the year in an upbeat way.  Here is my 4th-6th grade introduction to the Ridgecrest library video, highlighting some important ideas I wanted them to remember.  I used Keynote to create some slides with some text then exported them as jpgs and imported those right along with the photographs.  I thought they would enjoy hearing and seeing it in a way that didn't involve me standing up in front of them and talking.  We had short discussions after the video, but it definitely worked as an attention getter, even if some of them were dancing while watching.

I did another one that is about me, but I haven't had time to show it to classes yet.  I may save it as an example later on when we talk about other uses.  Book trailers, autobiographies, biographies, there are a lot of potential uses for Animoto.