Easy Movie-Making Alternative

In a recent post, I described a Digital Storytelling session in the Digital Sandbox for Administrators that fellow administrator, Antonio Vendramin and I offered for other Surrey School District administrators. You can read about that session here.  During this session, we used iMovie on the iPad to make 60-second movies.  These movies can be very creative and powerful.  They don’t take too much time, once you are used to using the app.

However, as we all know, as educators (administrators and teachers) we sometimes don’t even have “that” much time.  For instance, last Friday, our school had a Family Noisy Reading event to honour the upcoming Family Literacy Day. I wanted to share the photos of this event on our school Success Blog for all our families to enjoy. Usually, I just post some of the photos on the blog, but I really wanted to share most of the photos of this event.  To do this, I thought of using Animoto.  This is a great Web2.0 tool which allows you to upload the photos to the Animoto website and then it automates the video, based on which theme and music you choose. You can also add text to the pages. It is really effective and super easy to use.  The thought of taking all the photos off my iPad, however, made me cringe a bit.  So, I thought I would try the Animoto app on my iPad to see if it worked.

To my amazement, it worked wonderfully!  Not only did it work, but it allowed me to sign in to my education account (which lets you make longer movies).  It was so easy! This is all I did:

1. I opened the app and signed in to my Animoto account.

2. I clicked on the photos I wanted included from my iPad camera roll (you can include up to 300 photos using the free Education version of the app). When finished selecting, click on “use”.

3. Click on the up arrow on the bottom right (it is beside “Video Tools”). This is where you can easily change the style (theme), songs, add more photos or video, ans add text.

4. Once you have finished tinkering with these video editing tools, click Preview on the top right of the page. This will show you a preview of your video. If you want to change anything, just click on “Resume Edit”.  If you are satisfied with the video, add a title and description of the video, and click on Save Video (top right).

5. Now just wait while it produces the video.

6.  Time to share!  You can share this video at an assembly (not sure how the quality will look on a big screen using this mobile version), share it on your school website (making sure all students have media release first, of course), or share it with individua; teachers/families.  You can tweet out the video easily to your school Twitter feed (again, remembering all families must have media release). It can be shared via email and via text.  There are so many options!

I created this Animoto video using my iPad, the photos from our Family Literacy event on my iPad, and the Education version of Animoto is less than 10 minutes (maybe even less than 5)!  You really can’t beat that!

iMovie is a great app if you have a bit of time to customize a video to make something truly special and unique.  It has a great deal more power and countless options for video creation and editing. Animoto also creates great videos, a little less customized (there are only so many themes), but in a fraction of the time!

I’d love to see some of the videos you (or your students) create!