Creating with Animoto

Animoto is a fun program that can be used to quickly create sharp looking flash video music videos. You just upload your photos and then either add your own music or choose from their music and hit create and without any more work for you, you end up with a really fun music video. If you are not happy with the creation that is made, just hit remix and try again. This is all very cool, but where is the educational value? I decided to explore a little further to see what kinds of creative ideas I could think of for integrating this into our curriculum in meaningful ways. With Animoto, you can add your own mp3 file. So, you could create a narration using a sound editor like Audacity. Students could gather photos of a famous person and then tell their story. You could also add words by changing Power Point slides into JPegs. You could have kids put things into categories such as seasons, types of animals, etc. You can use drawings scanned by students. Students could do a book report by creating a theme song for a story read and then create a music video. Students could also create video trailers for books, times in history or what ever topic you might be studying. In math, you could send kids out with cameras to take photos of different shapes and then have them create songs that tell the attributes of the shapes. Schools could have a contest to create a promotional video for their school or to advertise for a school event. The winning video could be added to the school blog. As you can see, there are lots of ideas of how you could use this in your class. Anyone can create 30 second videos for free, but the good news is that educators can apply for an all access pass where both they and their students can create videos of any length. The videos can be downloaded and saved on a computer, embedded on websites, blogs and wikis, or e-mailed to others. Find out more about this great resource at Animoto in Education. Pin It Now!