I spotted Animoto via the NextGen Ning network and Justin’s post about it, further to that John and Doug have given it a mention. As you will quickly realise, and John rightly points out, Animoto is very simple. There is no real creative control over what you produce, you just throw some photos at it, choose a music track and out pops an MTV style video.

There is not much there for the children to really get their creative teeth into however it is a great little tool for producing quick and slick videos. Last year we used our class digital camera for recording our work in a science investigation for example, we then gave the children a sheet of thumbnails of these pics for their books. An extension of this simple idea would be to produce a quick movie of their science lesson or PE session. Not as a ICT, presentation task but as a simple, yet imaginatively presented, record of the work they have done.

(Image taken from Mashable Social Networking News )

Animoto makes a buck or two from the choice of longer more extended video lengths but for the work done in class the free 30 second videos is adequate. Taking a look today it seems since I have last used it Animoto has added the functionality of retrieving images from locations online. Currently these are Flickr, SmugMug, Picasa, PhotoBucket and Facebook. It worked fine for my Flickr account – offering me the choice of my different photo sets.

I just uploaded a few images from our DT work this year just to illustrate the idea. This is what I came up with. Unfortunately can’t see a way of embedding Animoto footage here. The final video is rendered and then you get an email telling you it is ready to view. Following the link that is included provides some publication options, I particularly liked the iGoogle page embed option which pops your vid onto your iGoogle start page in a new gadget frame.

All in all a useful tool to make quick video footage perhaps for record keeping purposes, but not much more than that. I will take a look at Fliptrack as an alternative soon.