Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Thing #22 Animoto

Wow! This has been the most exciting, but with the least amount of effort "Thing" that I have done so far. Animoto is so easy to use. When I first created my account, I was ready for a long, detailed tutorial like so many of the other "Things" we have done. I'll have to admit I wasn't disappointed when there wasn't a tutorial. It was just kind of jump in and get your feet wet! Needless to say, I was ready to get on with this "Thing" being the next to the last one. I was already itching to get to Thing #23 to finish everything up.

However, I was in for a surprise. It was baaically 1.2.3 and you're through. They walked you through step by step and it was really very easy. I went to Flickr and found fifteen pictures of the iPod Nano. I saved them in my Flickr favorites and went back to Animoto. Then Animoto asked me if I wanted to get pictures from my computer or a website. I clicked a button, it let me choose Flickr, had me login to my Flickr account and voila! The pictures were downloaded in a matter of seconds. I had already previewed the songs available from Animoto and had decided from the Techno genre. Another click and my music was there. The last step was to simply click the 3rd button to let Animoto put my pictures into a multimedia slide show with music. They did all the hard work in the 10 minutes it took me to find a snack and finish it off. When I got back to my computer, there it was ready for me to play. One last step and it was uploaded to my blog. I didn't even have to copy an HTML code. And it automatically loads and plays when I go to my blog.

I already have plans to create a show with pictures of some of my research units and post it on my wiki. I also would like to create a show of the pictures from Chidren's Bood Week to post on our Library website. The wheels are spinning with lots of ideas for this awesome tool. I am going to check in to making a longer movie, just to see what the charges are. If it's not too expensive, it will be worth the money to be able to create some longer shows.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey Sue,

Thanks very much for writing in. It's Becky, from Animoto. We certainly am glad you found the whole Animoto-process to be enjoyable.

We do actually have a quick tutorial with Tom, although it often times going without being clicked on.

As always though, if you ever have any questions, comments, suggestions or problems, you can write us at:

theguys@animoto.com

or post something on or ning board, which all the guys check regularly:

http://animotoaddicts.ning.com

thanks very much for including us in your web 2.0 exploration.

take care,
becky