Multimedia Sharing / Mashups

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 San Antonio to create a video of the basketball game that we went 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.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

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 San Antonio trip. I uploaded pictures from my computer then used them in the Glog I created. I found that only about half of the pictures that I tried to upload actually worked. Several of them would not upload and gave an error message something to the effect that they were a file type that was not recognized yet they were exactly the same file type as the ones I used that were successfully uploaded. Anyhow here is a Glog that I created. (Please don’t be too critical of my artistic side. I notice I am lacking in that regard and see that the Glogs created by grade 4 students are of higher quality than mine.

I also explored Voice Thread a bit. I went to their website and watched the introductory video on what it is and how to use it. I then signed up for the k-12 membership and continued my exploration. I must say however that although I found the application to be interesting and I think has some potential, I struggled with this site a lot. I did not create my own thread and simply played around a bit with some of the threads that were there. Perhaps I will need to give this another try another time. I think I may need to spend more time with it to really get a sense of its usefulness.

PERSONAL LEARNINGS

I thought that this week’s exploration allowed us to explore some of the “neat” features of Web2.0. I created the Animoto video with some of my pictures from my trip to San Antonio. I showed this to my wife and she said “hey that is kind of neat!”. This is no the typical reaction I get from her when I show her my pictures so I see this a way of creating a sort of value added feature to personal pictures. It is a lot more interesting to look through several pictures in an animated display with music playing in the background. When I am through with my masters classes and have some time on my hands once again, (will that ever happen?) then I plan on taking some more of our pictures and creating Animoto videos with them. I will have to explore the costs of joining because the 30 second limit may not be adequate.

Animoto and Glogster are simple programs that I will share with my kids. I am sure that they will be able to make use of these in some of their classes to support some of their assignments in schools. Jensen is constantly making posters for her classes and I think she will just love the creativity that Glogster will unleash.

TEACHING AND LEARNING

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 plan on sharing these sites with our team of E-learning catalyst teachers and having them work with teachers to start to explore how they might be used within their schools. We often have teachers use posters to summarize themes and by having them work with these programs it will take the poster to a much higher level.

As I was creating my blog on wikis I came across this Animoto video that was embedded in the wiki Soar 2 New Heights. It is an example of how Animoto can be used with and elementary class.

Another one of the wikis that I came across used Glogs created with Glogster. Students from around the world contribute Glogs that they create about their part of the world. The site has grown quite a bit and you can see glogs and contributed by students from around the world. Your class could contribute their own glog or you could use the site to learn about other countries.

References:

De Groot, J. (2010). Trailfire: Social Media Sharing /Mashups. http://trailfire.com/joannedegroot/marks/217496