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.
‘Horses for courses’, ‘It’s six and two threes’ and ‘At the end of the day…’ are my favourite three phrases. It’s impossible to work them into everyday conversation enough… 😉
Ahh! Now I’m a bit embarrassed. I am totally guilty of misreading my audience! Didn’t realize the tone of your blog–my bad! To remedy, I’ve read a number of your posts and have thoroughly enjoyed them.
But yeah, you’re right: it doesn’t sound like Animoto is the best instructional tool, even though I think I could still make the case that it has its (somewhat limited) place in the classroom. We like to make moving visual pieces to music, which might be suitable as a hook to interest students in a topic–maybe as the opening of a geography lesson on a foreign country, for example.
Thanks for the dialogue, regardless.
Sincerely,
TOM
P.s. Doug–I’m going to try to start using “horses for courses” more often.
Thanks Doug – you are of course correct to draw it all back to the pedagogy of the task beind the work. Why are we using this tool in the first place? Bubblr is a good little tool, I used it with my class last year – http://tbarrett.edublogs.org/category/bubblr/
It’s horses for courses, Tom. For example, using the same Flickr photos:
1. If you want to teach them how to present their work to the rest of the class, you could use Splashr.
2. If you wanted to get students to create a storyboard, you could use Bubblr.
3. If the focus was on taking the photos/designing the graphics in the first place, you might want to use Animoto to put everything together in a slick way.
It all depends on the pedagogy behind it… 🙂
PS Edublogs rejected my HTML links 🙁
Hey Tom, Tom here (no relation), from over at Animoto, and I just read your post–thanks for your candid review! Just wanted you to know that I’m one of the guys in charge of making Animoto Videos perpetually new, innovative, and scarily intelligent.
I take your point that right now, we’re a simple, one-click tool to produce a slick video production, “but not much more than that”. However, in my eyes this is our strength: we’re trying to leave the fully-featured online video editing systems to the other players and concentrate on doing as much as we can with very little user input.
Imagine if you gave one of your photo albums and a song you really liked to a video producer and asked him/her to come up with a great piece–without any more details than that. Our opinion is that you might be pleasantly surprised! And now imagine if you could ask that person to re-create that piece, in varying styles, as many times as you liked. True, there will always be people who will want more control, but the good news is that there are tools out there for them. We are taking a stand at the opposite side of the spectrum.
Regarding user control, we are trying to keep our cards close to our chest, releasing only the features for which an overwhelming sector of our users clamor. This is our chosen development paradigm: we want to do every feature well, instead of a lot of features so-so. Depth, not (yet) breadth. So if there are features you would like to see, come on over and put in your vote!
Thanks for your time, and I’m glad you’re enjoying the service thus far. Keep us in the loop with your feedback.
All the best,
TOM
P.s. Ping me if you’d like help embedding your vid on this site!