Animoto: education program

Reading Larry Ferlazzo's blog, I learned about Paul Hamilton's post, where he also mentions three other bloggers who all talked about this great opportunity animoto has just given educators.

I have already blogged about animoto because it is a great website that puts together photos and a song in a very modern flash-like presentation. The thing is that the free version only lets you create 30-second videos, and in order to have an all-access account, with which you can create longer videos, you have to pay.

Well, the good news is that animoto has just announced the animoto education program, which gives all-access codes to educators and their students, as long as they promise to keep animoto updated on the innovative ways students use this tool.

Here is an example of an animoto video I have created with the pictures of our school's (Casa Thomas Jefferson) Teachers' Day celebration (Oct. 15, 2007). Turn up the volume!

Voicethread and Splashcast - my own examples

Some weeks ago I wrote a contrastive review of Voicethread, Splashcast and Qlipboard, and now I've decided to post about my own personal and real experience using these tools with my students this semester (1/2008).

Larry Ferlazzo has come up with the great idea of a Sister Classes Project, where some teachers from different countries (8 countries are involved so far) develop (inter)cultural projects/presentations with their students and publish them at the Student Showcase blog for everybody's appreciation. Since I was already beginning a students' blog project with my 2 EFL advanced groups in this first semester of 2008, I was more than glad to join the Sister Classes Project. I also took this chance to spread the word about Brazil and to have my own personal student-generated voicethread and splashcast presentations.

What can't be denied is the power that tools such as these might have:

To prepare the first presentation, I first uploaded the pictures chosen by the students, and, two days later, took them to our school's computer lab for them to record their voices. In the mean time, without advertising the presentation to anyone, we already got our first comment, and it was from a regular voicethread user, not an English teacher and not an English student.
This gave a unique chance to tell my students that the project they were getting into was extremely meaningful because it would be out there, on the internet, for actual audience to appreciate, which made them really thrilled about it!

As soon as they recorded their voices, I published the presentation in the Students Showcase blog and, after some three weeks, I took them to the computer lab again so that they could answer the questions left to them by project partners' students. In order to get them evem more motivated about the project, I asked them to guess how many times they thought their presentation had been viewed so far. Most of them said a number under 100, and only one student was bold enough to guess 120. When I told them that their presentation had been viewed 426 times (on March 24. Today, March 25, it has been viewed 18 more times!), they were astonished and, I believe, began to feel the power of publishing on the internet.

I also hope this whole experience will give them a better sense of authorship and readership, for they are producing English (writing in their blogs and speaking in the presentations) for a real audience that is beyond the classroom walls, something difficult to reach in an EFL context. I also hope to help them see that this is the purpose of learning English, after all: to communcate!

Here are the presentations:
Feel free to leave voice, video or text comments in the shows!

This first presentation
was created by my teenage students using voicethread, and it is about the cities they considered to be the 5 most important cities in Brazil. This presentation was published, among other places, in this Student Showcase blog post.

This second presentation
was created by my adult students using splashcast - actually we recorded using Audacity and then I edited a video using Windows Movie Maker and finally uploaded it to Splashcast. It is about students' favorite vacation spots in Brazil. This one hasn't been published in the Student Showcase blog yet because I still need to add two more students' recordings.

Add Favorite Vacation Spot to your page

Voicethread x Splashcast x Qlipboard

Voicethread, Splashcast and Qlipboard are all tools that unite pictures and voice in slideshows. In order to compare them, I created a virtual tour around Brasília (my hometown) in each one of them. The tour is the same: same pictuers and same narration, because the idea was to really compare all the features offered. So here are the results followed by my review. Positive aspects are in blue and negative ones in red.
If there is any wrong information here (or extra information which I did not initially include), it was probably because I didn't explore the tools fully, so feel free to tell me and I'll readily update the reviews.

You can also check my own personal examples using voicethread and splashcast with my EFL students in the first semester of 2008.

Enjoy your tour!

Voicethread:

• The easiest to use. Dashboard is really user-friendly, with simple functions like upload and record.
• Comments can be left in voice or text forms
• Voice comments can be added with a cell phone too
  
• Comments are attached to specific pictures
• Comments are added to the original narration
  
• Pictures can be uploaded from your computer, flickr, facebook or you can just type their urls
• Besides pictures, you can also upload videos and documents
• Powerpoint/impress slides can be easily uploaded
  
• You can embed full-sized or small-sized versions
• There is comment moderation option
  
• It lets you doodle with the images, but only while you're recording
• You can create only 3 threads for free in the same account
• You can only add voice by recording online. You cannot record first, add effects, treat the audio and then upload the mp3 file.
• Visitors need to sign up for a voicethread account in order to leave comments.
  

Splashcast:

• Easy, but not as easy as voicethread. Dashboard is not as user-friendly because it offers more options, like designation of channels and players (which you need to create in order to get the html code).
• Pictures can be uploaded from your computer, flickr, or you can just type their urls
• You can record online or use any other audio recorder to make an mp3 file to be uploaded to one specific picture later
  
• Besides pictures, you can also upload videos and documents
• Comments are attached to specific pictures
• Comments can be left in voice, video or text forms
• Unlimited number of shows can be created for free
• Comments are stored in a separate "comments" area
• Visitors don't need to have a splashcast account in order to leave comments
  
• You can't doodle with the pictures (which might be good...)
• There is no comment moderation option (but comments can be easily deleted)
  

Qlipboard (online version):
The most traditional one is the offline version, which I

• It lets you doodle a lot with the picture, with pen, highlighter and text options. You can also change the colors of your drawing and texts
• There is no need to sign up for an account
  
• It allows only voice comments
  
• The most limited one because it doesn't create a slideshow connecting the pictures, but just one picture with voice narration

The idea of this review is not to make one tool look good and the other(s) bad. I believe their particular features fit different purposes. So the choice of which tool to use in an activity lies in the goals of the activity.

A little more on slideshows

This one was suggested by webhead Rita Zeinstejer.

GifUp is a "gif animation" and "avatar generator" website. What I particularly liked about it is the fact that it creates a nice photo slideshow with pictures taken from your webcam, uploaded from your computer, or searched from any website (a flickr search is already included).

In this example, I used the "Create an animation from Flickr images" option. I typed the word "Brasília" (my hometown), clicked on the pics I actually wanted in my animation, and that's it! My animation was ready with html code and a link to advertise my animation. I probably spent some whole 2 minutes doing everything.

Photo slideshows

Here goes my first update in 2008!

Working with Carla Arena and Erika Cruvinel at Casa Thomas Jefferson as one of our website content managers, one of our jobs is to cover the events that happen at our school and publish them in our website. For a long time, we have been using free photo slideshows to do this, for example slide (my favorite), bubbleshare, picture trail, rock you (I know JA loves this one) and others. Here is an example of a slideshow of our Thanksgiving celebration we created using slide:

However, in mid 2007, through the LWC group (Learning With Computers), I discovered animoto - a website that creates a more modern photo presentation, and all you have to do is add the pictures and choose a song from their song bank (or upload your own song). Animoto already has a group of effects that are added to your video according to beat of the song used. You can create an unlimited number of 30-second videos for free, or pay (not much) to create longer videos. Here is an example of a video I created about CTJ's Teachers' Day party (Oct. 15, 2007). Turn up the volume:



After you create the video, you can send the link by email, get the html code to embed it (just as I have done here) or download it and use it any other way you would like.

Have fun!