Wow! The past few days I have been traveling, and it seems like everything is so difficult. I have had airport delays in the airport and in the air. I have been lost driving up the East Coast and road construction projects have been time consuming. So, after dealing with all of this for the past few days, I got to my hotel this evening wiped, and I actually thought that this was going to one of those times when I just couldn't get the assignment done. However, Animoto is everything that my travel this week wasn't...Easy!!

I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to do for my video project this week, and it was nagging at me as I was going through all of these fun travel adventures. I don't have a video camera, but my photo camera will take short videos. So, I played with that for a while, but besides videos of the dog smashing his nose into the lens. there wasn't much inspiration. Then, I remembered these great pictures and testimonials that I had saved from another project. Now, I just needed to figure out how to get them into a video. I had worked with some different software in the past trying to put together videos, but I'd never been very successful. That is why I am so impressed with Animoto; it was so easy. Because I was using a free subscription, I was only able to put together a short 30 second video. However, I am seriously thinking that an upgraded subscription would be well worth my money. Having said that, the video that you see is just a fragment of what I had originally put together. In order for all of my pictures and testimonials to be seen, I will have to put into into a longer, full-length video.

After finishing up my video, and I say that with a little bit of reservation, because all I did was upload some pictures and type in some testimonials. Animoto did the rest. So, after finishing my video, I was thinking about different activities that can be done with this type of media:

Videos can be viewed by students, and they can can critique them based on their learning objectives. For example, a student can view an organizer making a house call. Afterwards, he/she can share ideas via a discussion board about what was done well and what could be done differently.

Also, videos can be used to teach a step by step process that can be duplicated by the student. If the video is made available on a place like YouTube, the tutorial could be made to be downloaded and accessed from anywhere at anytime.

The videos could be used for learning as well as assessment.

Finally, the videos can be created by the students. One thing that I thought about was using them in an online class in order to get to know the other students - Icebreaker activities for example - these quick and easy videos can be used to present oneself to the entire class.

I think that the reason I got so excited thinking about all of the different ways that this could be used, because it was so user friendly for a TechStudent. I think that I'll be using Animoto for lots of projects at work and at home.