Animoto helps create visually interesting slide shows using pictures, video and text. You simply choose a template, insert your material into a storybook sequence and then publish. It reminds me of Prezi made into a video with music–items fly around and there is lots of visual stimulation. The trial version is pretty limited and has the Animoto watermark on it. Once completed you can share your presentation in a variety of ways (Facebook, Youtube, etc). Music is included with the presentation–I found it rolled over the audio in my video and volume couldn’t be adjusted. Video clips downloaded to the presentation were limited to 10 seconds at a time but you can add a longer video and cut it into pieces right in the storyboard. I didn’t see a way to adjust the amount of time on each slide which I found myself wanting to do to emphasize a certain slide.
Overall I think this would be a fun piece to add to a learning module to summarize the content or tell a story of impact or to market a certain aspect. It wouldn’t be useful for teaching detailed content. Like most learning objects, you would have to have content to download ie. videos or pictures. Students could use this for simple presentations but again, it would be hard to add a lot of content. Think mostly–FUN.
Cost is $9.99, $19.99, or $29.99 per month. Here’s my presentation using the school template in Animoto:
Review by Patty Case
Patty, thanks for introducing Animoto with your review and a very well done sample of what this tool can do. You mentioned potential student use of Animoto; this reminded me of another blog post that mentions an interesting way of using Animoto and other visual and presentation tools, “Student-Produced Artifacts as Discussion Starters” (http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/inspire/2013/05/20/student-produced-artifacts-as-discussion-starters/), by Jonan Donaldson, an OSU Ecampus instructional designer. In a learning-centered hybrid course, there’s much to be gained by thinking of students as content creators for the benefit of everyone’s learning.
Hi Patty! Thanks for reviewing this. I think you were spot on with your review of Animoto. Yes, it is very limited with video length, etc. It might do well as a means to create some motivators in the early stages of a lesson/module to pull folks into the content. We are somewhat in the “edu-marketing” realm here, but that is often what is needed to capture attention and motivation to learn. It might easily lend itself to humor, too, which when done well (not easy to do) can become infectious. Here’s something I did using Voki, another animation tool with perhaps the same odd, but potentially intriguing use.
Didn’t know you were a Scotsmen Jeff. Thanks for the example and the laugh. Do you think they have a “lunch lady” person? Thanks for your comment too, Cub–so many different ways to hook the learner.