Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Free Animoto for educators

A couple of weeks ago I was raving about Animoto, which is a software that allows you to upload photos and images, and make into a video. The free version allows you to make a 30 second video, whilst a nominal amount of US$30 per year allows you to make any length videos.

Animoto in education
Thanks to Allanahk, I have just found out that you can access Animoto's full amenities free of charge if you are using it for educational purposes. To see examples of how Animoto is being used by teachers, have a look here - I thought the video on bullying was exceptionally effective.

Animoto for midwifery
I can think of heaps of ways Animoto can be used for and by midwifery students for projects and presentations such as teaching skill development and illustrating specific knowledge like mechanism of labour. And, it can be incorporated in student's eportfolios or downloaded and saved onto discs for more traditional portfolios - this is a unique facility for use in education.

3 comments:

Sarah Stewart said...

Thank you very much Sarah for the Animoto Education links. I have just viewed the examples and they mostly remind me of the mix we see during titles at the beginning of a film. They have quite a slick appearance and images are often are well complemented by the music which grabs attention and draws the viewer in. However, I would be interested in seeing how this could be developed to a deeper level. The vocabulary exercise for example seemed to have potential, but I wonder whether more time is needed by the viewer to actually take in what the content is. For me, and perhaps it is only me, the change of image speed tends to be too fast, as is the message, and the message is just an intro. My question is where to next with this medium?

I have been doing some other thinking about media speed and I will look for some more about how long and how often we need to view new content for it to "stick". The notion of "stickability", from the conference, a new way of phrasing something we often talk about, I found interesting.

Dawn


Hi Dawn
I agree its hard to get a message across and the 30 seconds video is just a bit of fun, or an introduction. But when you look at the educators site, and you see much longer videos, I felt that some get the message across very effectively.

As for stickability, I do believe this is an issue that deserves attention in this day of limited attention span. I'm not sure what the answer is - lots of repetition? What do you think?

Sarah

Anonymous said...

Hi Sarah,

Thanks so much for the write-up! I'm Rebecca Brooks from Animoto. We actually just today launched a brand new site for our education initiative. Be sure to check it out:

http://education.animoto.com/

Take care,
Rebecca @ Animoto

Sarah Stewart said...

Thank you very much for that, Rebecca. I am running a postgraduate midwifery course for midwives who are putting their portfolios together. I think an Animoto video would go really well into their portfolios - just got to get them to engage with this electronic tool, which may be easier than said!