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Announcing: Animoto for Education

April 4, 2008
Animoto, the tool that allows you to produce MTV-style videos in no time flat, recently added the ability to download videos as MP4s or Quicktime movies, to export video directly to YouTube, and most importantly, it just added an educators edition which includes many of the formerly premium features:

Not only will students be able to use their own accounts to make full-length videos while in-class or at home, they also can download their videos. This may make presenting in class easier when an internet connection isn't available. Also, since each student will have their own account, they can share videos amongst each other more readily.

Import your images, select music from the site's copyright-friendly library of songs or import your own music.  Choose the image order and select images you'd like to spotlight.  You have the option of making a 30-second or longer, full-length feature. The application does the work, creating animation around your images.

Animoto's Rebecca Brooks explained the impetus behind the version for education:

Ever since we launched Animoto last August, almost immediately educators started to use the service. This was all unexpected. Often times we got asked about discounts for teachers, special licensing for schools. Since educators were pretty much one of the first groups of people who caught on to Animoto, and especially since we all have a deeply-rooted respect for educators, we decided to do the Animoto for Education program in lieu of charging educators. The only thing we ask is that any and all participants update us about the creative ways that they use Animoto in the classroom. We hope to post the most clever & educational ways Animoto is used on our Animoto for Education site.

We've used Animoto for opening montages of classroom activities for Parents' Night.  I used it to create promotional video for the library.  Here's one I did back in January to archive and capture some of the excitement of the EduCon08 Conference.

I like this tool for any projects for which we'd formerly create a collage--the gathering of multiple pieces to create new context.  Imagine a collage showcasing student work or art, gathering historical images and relevant music or soundtrack to introduce a time period, paintings and sound to introduce an artist or artistic movement. You could easily use it to promote school programs or activities.

The Help page explains how it all works:

Animoto uses patent-pending technology to analyze your images and everything about the selected music -- its structure, genre, energy, build, rhythm -- before developing a blueprint for the motion design of your video. The remaining time is spent rendering your video, using a giant farm of computer processors to custom-generate 15 new images per second for your final video.

Some bloggers argue that Animoto doesn't inspire a lot of creativity or higher order thinking, partly because the program does so much of the creative work, the animation choices, the transitions.  I argue, we have other tools for deeper thought and sophisticated movie making.

Animoto is a magically-easy way to grab attention, produce professional-looking public relations products, archive an event, visually showcase our best, and create new visual contexts.

Posted by Joyce Valenza Ph.D on April 4, 2008 | Comments (1)