by Rina Alarez and Jennifer Melson from Highland Park ISD

"Welcome to the end of slide shows"

Kids don't have to worry with all of the animation so they can focus on the content.

Features

Remix - not satisifed with the "end product" and the automatic presentation, you can "remix" the animation

Spotlight - use this tool to highlight or zero in on the one thing that you want to stand out in your presentation

Text - includes photos, videos, and text (Only two lines of text per slides or creating a PowerPoint slide and saving it as a .jpg)

Share and Download - you can email the link, post to social networks, embed into a website, publish to YouTube, Burn a DVD, Download to your computer, connect to the Animoto iPhone app

Free - free for educators (different sections), though you do have to apply for an account, but if you just use the "basic" account, you're limited to only 30 seconds of video, but if you apply for the all access pass you have unlimited time.

Math - shows us how she used it to create a show of how cones appear in real world

Science - makes a commerical about visiting a planet (like the travel channel) 

Language Arts - put together a writing prompt...watch the video and then have them write on what they see.

Put together photos from a field trip, presentation for your parent's to see at open house.

How to set up an educator account...

http://animoto.com/education use this to sign up for a free all access pass...

Suggests that you use a gmail account which is the easiest way to have student accounts link to one main email

Once you register, you receive an email (may take a while...) with instructions and information to set up student accounts

Basically you create an email for your student and use the original account (parent) followed by a number (1, 2, 3) and therefore everything (emails) are sent to the parent email.

How they handle creating the student information

They use a generic password and the accountability factor applies because their students know they can see everything.

Basically, to protect students, create generic accounts (Firstname: Student; Lastname: 1, Birthday - just needs to be over 13 and they made it the same for everyone)

They then created a spreadsheet to keep track of the students who were using which accounts 

Creating Your First Video

Animoto suggests you use Firefox

Pick about 25-30 images (jpeg or gif - 5MB or less, PowerPoint slides converted to jpeg or gif)

Music (animoto provides a wide variety of music, download free music: jamendo, dmusic, soundclick): studens know where to get it

Finishing Your First Video

Renders

takes a while so you can go away from that screen (or even log out) and it'll render and be read the next time you log in

Four icons at the top of the page to share facebook and twitter

How do they get the presentations

They have the students email the video to them

Video Archive

If you create that parent email account, everything is sent there and creates a video archive

Lesson Plan (3 days)

Day 1 - Research

Day 2 - Plan

Day 3 - Create video and finalize

Because it's hosted on the web, they can work on it from home and can be working on it at the same time to work together as a group

How can you download it to your computer and is there a cost associated with that?

What's the learning curve for kids as far as walking them through the process? Most of their kids are comfortable.

If Gmail is blocked in your school? Do you have to then do the projects at home? Don't have to access the Gmail account at work and you can tell them to email the information to your school account.

How do you handle copyright? Site their sources and include that in their video as their last slide. Creative Commons...not all are free imagines; School account at StockExchange; Need to have that discuss and teach them how to know if that image is free to use, Pics4Learning; Animoto has images as well