Working with Animoto, Picknik, and Freeplay

This week's assignment was so much fun to complete. I had never worked with Animoto and was a bit unsure of what the program would have in store for me (I am not the most technologically savvy individual). In my classes, I asked my senior students if they had heard of the program and they had not so I gathered that this may be an untapped resource. I created a video for the novel The Kite Runner which is an amazing story exploring the topic of human fallibility. If you have not read this modern classic yet you should. The video I created would be used to introduce the novel to my students as well as to introduce students to their task of analyzing the symbols used throughout the novel.

All three resources were easy and fun to use. I was a bit upset that some of the cooler features on Picknik were not available unless I was willing to pay. Using Picknik I was able to take the cover of The Kite Runner, crop it, frame it, and make both a pencil sketch and a matte finish to create an opener and closer for my video with a bit more punch. I also took the Wordle that was originally white and change background to blue and create a bolder look for the image. In the future, I would like to play around with personal images to create some awesome images. My only frustration with Amimoto was that I wish I could rearrange some images without deleting pictures and then reorganizing. The music I found really really captures the tone of the novel so I was pleased that found compatible music so easily on Free play. Overall, I though the resources were user-friendly and just plain neat.

I will be including Animoto in my class more often and am in the process of trying to put together a project for students to use Animoto. I am grateful that we were able to create a project using such cool resources.