Circumventing Animoto

I'm not all that thrilled about the re-designing of Animoto.  Dropping the "shared" videos tab makes a teacher's life  harder--I liked being able to just scroll through that to watch/grade my student's videos.  Worse, I've now lost access to all the past videos that I used for demonstrations, since they've locked down the site so you can no longer search through other users' public videos.  What's up with that, Animoto???

My internet connection here in Borneo is not the best; it can take forever to log on, and once you're on, it repeatedly kicks you off.  Not good for a 50 minute presentation highly dependent on online videos and tools.  I've been frantically trying to "internet proof" the workshop the last few nights:  I downloaded the Prezi, took screenshots of the apps (Animoto and Myna) in case they're not working, and downloaded the Animoto videos.  That's where I hit the troublespot:  Two of my examples were from my last school, and since they're not in my account, I can't download them (though, fortunately, I had links, so could still access them!)

I tried using Video Download Helper (a Firefox add-on) to download the booktrailer, but that doesn't work on Animoto anymore.  After trying a couple other tools, I finally found Real Player SP for Mac.  It's a quick download, then

• Open the program, go to File>Open Location, add the URL and wait for RP to load the page.
•  In the meantime, go to Window>Open RealPlayer Downloader.
• Back in the RealPlayer window, click play for the video, which will open it in Downloader, with a download button. Click that, and you're good to go!

Book Trailer Presentation

I'm giving a presentation tomorrow on Animoto book trailers.  I'm hoping to be chosen to present at the EARCOS conference in spring.  (Inshallah!)

Anyway, in my continuing quest to master Prezi, here is my "slideshow."

Rockin'BookTrailers (and other reports) with Animoto on Prezi

Four Minute Annual Report

With complete, unabashed plagiarizing of the idea from Buffy Hamilton, here is my 4 minute Annual Report. Buffy's is better, no doubt.  If you haven't seen it, it's worth your time to watch.   Mine is what I could put together having done a lousy job of taking photographs of library activities this year.  So it goes. Next year, I'll know better...and plan.

Animoto Book Trailers

I worked on a project with the 7th graders a couple weeks ago. We used Garage Band and Animoto to create book trailers for the novels they chose for an independent reading assignment.

They searched for photos in Flickr Creative Commons, used music from Royalty Free Music and Free Play Music, used Power Point to create Works Cited slides and saved them as JPEGs. I did let them find their book and author images from a Google images search, figuring if they're not public domain, they should be! I'm not sure that's an argument that would actually hold up in court, of course....

There is an issue with Animoto cutting off the end narration and the final (Works Cites) slides, but I'm trying to figure out a work around for that. I think if you allow the soundtrack an extra 15 seconds or so of music beyond the narration, that will force Animoto to use those final slides. That's my theory, anyway!
Here's a sample of the result.

Book Reports 2.0--And Royalty Free Music

Remember those boring book reports we all had to give (and listen to!) back in the day??

Well, give them a spiffy new look with Animoto. I'm helping the 7th graders do their annual book reports today, so I spent last night doing this demo explaining the assignment (and giving them a sense of what Animoto can do.)

I used Garage Band to record the narration and sound track (Audacity would work for Windows people), saved it as an MP3, then uploaded it into Audacity. I made the slides with Power Point (saved as jpegs), uploaded some creative commons photos (that I should have cited, but didn't. Bad modeling!) and voila!

It did take about 8 "re-mixes" to finally get the soundtrack and images to sync-up reasonably well. Take a look at the result.


For some reason, the Works Cited slide at the end isn't showing up...

Here's the pathfinder I put together for the project. I should also add that Royalty Free Music is now offering educator grants that allow free access to their archives for school use.

Enjoy the Connecticut Autumn

Playing with Animoto. They have an "educator edition" now, that lets teachers have full-length versions for free.

Here's one I made with some photos I took while walking the dogs a few weeks ago.


Wouldn't this be a great tool for book reviews? Several of our classes are working on book reports right now. I'm going to talk to the teachers about using Animoto instead, have the students find related images, create voice and soundtrack in Garage Band, then link them to the library website for student book reviews.

Animoto: Not your run-of-the-mill slideshow

Ewan McIntosh posted about Animoto this morning, so I decided to play around (I'm in major packing avoidance..). This is about as cool as it gets. I can't stop watching this thing! Upload photos from your desktop, Flickr, MySpace page, etc. Add music (I found mine on PodSafe Audio, a Creative Commons site), then Animoto generates a music-video quality slideshow. Wouldn't this be fantastic for students? Photographers and musicians could get together to create their own music videos.
Other Uses:

• Back-to-school night events--have the show on a loop, featuring pictures of kids-in-action, with student-composed music.
• Advertise student musical productions before the event, especially in districts with morning video announcements!
• Students choose photos to illustrate poems they've written (or better yet, take their own!), use Audacity or GarageBand to narrate the poems and add music. Upload it all to Animoto: semi-instant poetry reading!
• New library books (I need to check copyright issues on this), collect pictures of the covers from new books, put it together with some music, or your own narration (see above), and show it on morning announcements. Great project for your library volunteers!

Shows up to 30 seconds are free, or you can buy unlimited video length for $3/video or $30 per year.