Animoto

Note: Teachers should always investigate recommended sites before deciding to use a resource in their classrooms.

I really LOVE Animoto. Upload your own photos or use theirs, pick some cool music and presto! you've got a flash MTV style video. In the samples below, I used PowerPoint to generate the images, so don't let a lack of photographs stop you from creating a video. Just cover each slide with an appropriate image from the clip art gallery, then save the presentation as a jpg image. Presto, you have digital images for your Animoto videos or any other project for that matter. (More detailed instructions will be added to the Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials page soon.)

The educational applications possible with Animoto are practically endless. Go to Animoto in Education to find out more about getting a free full access account to Animoto that you and your students can use. This book trailer is a "short" video. Full access is not required to create videos like this one. You can quickly create a library of videos to capture the interest of readers and non-readers alike.

__The Giver__
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"Extreme Weather"
This is an example of a full-length video that uses still photos and short video clips to introduce a weather unit. (Note: I'm in the process of editing this video to add more examples of extreme weather, but Animoto makes it so easy to do and don't worry, you won't lose any of the versions.

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Creating Animoto Educator Accounts
The first thing you need to do is to create your Animoto Educator Account. Sign up at https://animoto.com/education/signup. Fill in the form, making sure you use your school email account and provide the URLs for any class pages you might already have. Animoto will check the information out to make sure you are a teacher. This could take several days. When they have verified that you are a teacher, you will be sent a confirmation email with information about activating your class account and creating your student accounts. If you have older students with their own email addresses, you can give the class code to them, and direct them to the student sign-up page. Students under 13 should not create their accounts. You can create them so that you have full control of the email addresses used. There will be no danger of outsiders contacting them or seeing their work (unless they provide the URL for the videos). In your confirmation email, you will be directed to the Getting Started page which contains a lot of valuable information on creating a new Gmail account for yourself that you will use only for creating student accounts and monitoring their work. Check out the FAQs there.

The second thing you need to do is create a Gmail account that you will use only for Animoto purposes.Then, go to @https://animoto.com/sign_up to create your first student account. For the email address, you will use your newly created gmail account, but you will add '+1', '+2', etc. to the username (no spaces). These are dummy accounts that allow your students to login to Animoto, but they can't be used by the students to communicate with outsiders. All communication to the student email addresses comes directly to you for monitoring.

Example: My gmail account is DragonAnimoto@gmail.com. My student accounts are DragonAnimoto+1@gmail.com, DragonAnimoto+2@gmail.com, etc. Hint: Since my accounts will be used by teachers in training, I just gave them the names of fictional characters and they were all born on 1/1/1991. Finally, to make sure that your students have full access to Animoto, you will need to click on "Promo/Referral Code" at the bottom and enter the classroom code provided in your initial confirmation email. Click the Sign Up button and if everything is okay, the student's account will be created and open up. Just sign out, click the Sign Up link and repeat for your other students.

If you have any problems, please contact me at BrottS@cisdmail.com

How To's
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Adding Audio
You can add your own audio to your Animoto videos provided you adhere to copyright and fair use guidelines. I recommend two programs for obtaining and editing soundtracks. Audiograbber is a program that lets you 'snag' or rip portions of soundtracks from CDs and convert them to mp3 files. Since the fair use guidelines limit you to using 10% or 30 seconds (whichever is less) of copyrighted music, this program will let you take the exact number of seconds you are entitled to from any point in the song. Once you have a collection of music segments from a variety of songs, you can 'piece' them together into one long audio track using the free audio editing program Audacity,. More information on using these programs will be added soon.

Kudos
Check out what other teachers are doing with Animoto.