Fotobabble lets you create talking photos in two clicks. Simply upload a photo and then record your voice directly through your computer to create a talking photo. You can easily share it by e-mail, Facebook, Twitter or embed it into a blog or website.
It’s free and all completely web-based. No software to download, just register and get started in seconds.
“Let’s hear it for innovative ways to help students get more excited about reading… AND… the legal, transformative remixing of copyrighted works like the song, “I’ve Gotta Feeling” by the Black Eyed Peas! The five minute YouTube video, “Gotta Keep Reading,” was created by students and staff at Ocoee Middle School, working with college students from Full Sail University.”
It’s been more quiet than usual around here. That’s because I’ve been working on a new site hosted at http://istianjinelearning.org/blog/todbaker. I’m calling it IT K5. It’s where I write about classroom and other edtech news from the perspective of a teacher. For this site, I write mostly from the perspective of my other role, the IT coordinator. I’m not sure what to do with these two sites yet. Do I keep them separate or bring them together? For now, I’ll maintain both of them and see where the discussions lead me. If I’m sharing the same ideas and talking the same edtech on both sites, well then I might as well merge the two sites. We’ll see.
For their latest unit of inquiry, How We Express Ourselves, the grade 4 students hosted an art exhibition for the IST school community. Each student displayed original artwork along with the process and other inquiry-driven inspirations. I walked through the exhibition with a Flip MinoHD recording 5-10 second clips. Later at my computer, with FlipShare software I imported the clips, added a title slide and sewed all the clips together. I then exported the movie to my desktop and uploaded it to Vimeo. Making this basic movie was fast and easy. We’ll use it as a talking point for this year’s students to reflect on the night and next year’s students to envision their night.
We played this video at the goodbye assembly for Margaret Read MacDonald on Friday afternoon. (We’ll have to settle for a link today. The embed code is not working for some reason.) We wanted a quick video or slide show to summarize the three days for everyone. Pressed for time, we needed something that would be easy to make and exciting to watch. We turned to Animoto. It turns photos into slide shows and synchs the photos with music. From camera to video on the desktop, here’s how I made the video.
The Steps
Extracted the photos from the camera into iPhoto.
Exported the photos to a folder on my desktop with the settings medium quality and large size.
Selected Create Video > animoto originals > Full Length.
Uploaded the photos, arranged them by dragging and dropping, and added some text slides.
Selected music from the Animoto collection (could use own collection too).
Selected an image pacing speed of 1/2 and a video cover image .
Added a title and description and selected Create Video.
Waited about 10 minutes for it to render.
Downloaded the video to my desktop.
I completed all of those steps in just under one hour. That included some discussion with Beth Gourley about the title slides and some text slides. Not bad. I wasn’t totally pleased with the video created though. Some of the photos I uploaded and some of the text slides I created did not make it into the video. At least they were not prominent enough to be noticed. With more time I would have remixed this. Animoto gives us a remix button that creates a totally different slide show. But it was nearly 2pm and I had to set this up at 2:30, so I took what I had at the moment. I could still remix it though as it’s still sitting in my video collection.
Animoto is a great way to create exciting movies from photos. You can even add videos. You can synch it with the music in the Animoto collection or add your own. I think a voice over would work well. But by itself, it’s not creative video making at all. It’s really just uploading and button pushing. To get creative, try downloading your video and then importing it into your favorite video making application like iMovie. I think Animoto videos make excellent transition pieces or introduction type movies. Give it a try!
