My+digital+storytelling+tools

Animoto

This is a project work I created with my daughter for her English class. It is called 'Greeny the monster'. The project is based on a reading text and composition task from English World 2, Unit 8. This unit introduced the Past Simple of 'to be' and recycled body parts vocabulary and some adjectives. media type="custom" key="12925540" We took pictures with a digital camera and created two short videos of my daughter talking to the monster with a webcam, a headset and Debut Video Capture software. I decided to use Animoto because it combines text, images and videos. My comment on using Animoto this time: + Since I upgraded my Animoto account to Educator's (free upgrade), I can create 3 min videos. It's great not to be limited by time and length of the video and 3 minutes are more than enough to complete a project. + Animoto is really easy to use. + There is a new feature on Animoto - you can slow down or speed up the pace of slides with images, you can fix the volume of background music and you can choose when the music starts.

- The length of video files which you upload is limited to 10 seconds. If the video is longer, it just gets cut (like it happened with my second video piece in this presentation) and you'll view only the first 10 sec. of it in your presentation. - You can't change the speed of text slides, and they pass a bit too fast for primary ESL children to read. - Text slides have a frustrating limit - 22 characters for the heading and 30 characters for the text (compare with 140 characters on Twitter). I had to start a sentence in the heading line and finish it in the text line, but it was still not enough. The project sentences should be really short and laconic with Animoto. Could my students create such projects? Although Animoto is a very simple tool and could be used with primary children, the preparation work for such project requires more knowledge and skills. I did photo resizing (it's not necessary, but large images take long to upload), video capturing also requires some skills (although with Debut software it was really easy). So if we want to create such kind of individual projects with our students, they need to be taught such skills as taking photos, moving them from their device to a computer, editing/resizing them, capturing videos with a webcam or other devices, saving videos and photos and giving them names. Secondary and senior students are tech-smart enough to learn doing it on their own (especially with their phones), but for primary students it will be difficult, so unless they have a tech-friendly parent, another format of a project work needs to be used.

I would also like to try other tools for the same project. It would be great to include voice commentaries. Images, videos, voice comment, text.. does such a perfect tool for presentations exist? The only tool of this kind I know is Windows Movie Maker. Got to try it!

GoAnimate Exploring GoAnimate functions media type="custom" key="13271904"

About GoAnimate http://teachweb2.wikispaces.com/GoAnimate