Animoto

As regular readers of this blog will know I’ve been involved in the connected classrooms project #ccGlobal for the past few months (http://connectedclassrooms.wordpress.com/). Towards the end of November it was decided to connect the classrooms by sending holiday greetings around the globe. The plan was to create electronic greetings, create a QR code to connect to the greeting and then sent the QR code in a physical card to other classrooms participating in the project. It wasn’t prescribed how to produce the electronic greeting but Animoto was suggested as a possible tool. Animoto is a web tool that allows you to create you to create video greetings (http://animoto.com/). I’d never used Animoto before but agreed to help out with producing the greeting for my daughter’s class. We took some photos to be used in the greeting, both of the girls and of their artwork. I created an account on Animoto (this isn’t strictly necessary) and got started. With the free standard account you can create 30 second videos. Creating a video with Animoto involves just a few simple steps :

1. select a style
2. upload pictures or videos
3. choose music
4. add text

There are various styles to choose from and we chose ‘pop-up pandemonium’ which had a Christmas feel about it. Next you can upload pictures – between 10 – 15 pictures for a greeting (some styles can take more pictures and some less). You can also choose the music you want to attach to your greeting – either from the list of music pre-loaded on Animoto or you can upload your own music. Finally you can add some text which can be interspersed among the pictures. Once you have gone through all of the steps you then produce the video which can be shared. What I loved most about using Animoto was how much the girls loved their greeting – they watched their greeting every morning before they started class and were very excited to see the number of views for the greeting as it was sent around the world. Have a look at the greeting we made http://animoto.com/play/zGDxG6dcj2xr9yLzc0BD0Q. We also included their greetings on a post on the school blog which we wrote in the week before Christmas (http://conventprimarynenagh.scoilnet.ie/blog/2011/12/21/christmas-in-miss-murnanes-3rd-class/). Animoto is a great web tool which is very easy to use and produces great results.