Multimedia Sharing and Mashups? What is this all about? With a name like that one can only guess what it is all about….
REFLECTIONS ON LEARNING
As I started this unit of study I found myself wondering what this is all about. I have never ever heard this term, never heard of any of the sites mentioned and certainly had never ever used any of these tools. I started the week as a pure rookie!
To start my learning I went through the trailfire set up for our course again. The two sites that were explained here were Animoto and Voice Thread so this is what I decided to try out.
I went to the Animoto website and poked around a bit to see what I could discover. I noticed that the site seemed to be a bit more on the commercial side of things than other sites we have explored. I then decided to jump right in and give this a try so I set up another account for myself. There were lots of ads to sell me a feature that will allow me to create full length videos. The free service only allows you to create 30 second video. Beyond that you need to pay for the additional services. I did not sign up or try that so do not know how expensive it would be.
I looked at some of the sample videos and decided that I would create one of my own. I used pictures of my recent trip to
I found the site easy to use and very quickly I was able to create a very neat short advertisement type add for the basketball game I had attended. I uploaded a few of the pictures that I took along with a short video. These were then selected for inclusion. A short length of the video was also selected to include as well. I then rearranged the images and added text. The next stage was adding music. This was made easy because you could either upload your own music file to use or simply use one of the free to use pieces of music that were arranged by category and you could also preview the music. Within minutes I was waiting for the final product to be displayed.
I was impressed with the set up of the site and the fact that as the final product was being created you were encouraged not to wait around but to move onto some other project or work and when it was finished it would email the final product to you. When it was completed you were then prompted to view, share, upload to YouTube, or embed code for the video into a blog etc. I have embedded that code below and you can watch a short commercial like video of my trip to see the San Antonio Spurs basketball game.
During my work this week I found some samples of Glogs which I thought might also fit into this category. I went to Glogster and signed up for an account with them as well. I found Glogster to be easy to use and similar to Animoto except it creates a poster or “Glog” that is not animated. Again I thought that I should try this and created the Glog of my
Doesn't it seem amazing that there are so many tools that we don't hear about easily in schools? I have been using animoto for a while, as has my class, and I have also been using Glogster. Apparently I must have tried Voice Thread as wll as I had used up my three free trials.
ReplyDeleteAnimoto does let educators use the full powers of the site (full length videos) for free; you just need to apply for an educators acocunt. As well, this will allow you to set up student safe logins. REally worthwhile as the kids learn basic skills (finding, saving, loading pictures and videos) and do't get bogged down with the transitions, fancy stuff. You can save that for movie maker, photo story 3, or the like. A great resource. Check out my page for how I used Animoto to introduce a movie and then Voice Thread with the same pictures to make an inquiry project.
"These programs are not used at all in any of schools. I suppose it is a matter of teachers being aware of them and then having the confidence to use them." I am not aware of any of these tools being used in our school either. It would be interesting to know if the students are familiar with these tools anyway. I think it would be interesting to see what Web 2.0 tools students are using besides Facebook and YouTube.
ReplyDeleteLois