Domo Arigato, Mr. Animoto

Reflections on Learning

Whereas last week I walked into wikis with some background knowledge and some experience, this week I entered the world of multi-media sharing and Animoto and Voicethreads as a complete newbie. One of those ultimate digital immigrants we hear and read about in all of the academic papers.

I’ve made it clear from the start of this course that I have (or had) some prejudices about some of the tools. I was already a fan of wikis and that alone made it easy to explore them; I saw no use for social bookmarking (but have an appreciation for that now) nor did I have much use for Facebook (the jury is still out on that one). However, with Animoto and Voicethreading I had no bias, in fact I had nothing at all. I came at this as an open book.

My thinking at this point in the course is that the good surprises have out-numbered the disappointments and it is because of this that I look forward to trying some new things out each week.

This week’s learning was also a little bit different in that we were really dealing with a couple of specific web-based software applications that were really easy to use. They seem to be the kind of tools that are ready for take off, but aren’t quite there yet. A scan of the research will show you that little work has been done on these two tools/


The Personal Level

After playing with these toys this week, this is the first time I felt that my blog was turning into something more than a list of assignment postings. Maybe it was all the talk this week about Will Richardson’s blogging levels, but I think the playing around with Animoto and Voicethread (I’m going to call it VT) has really added a personal touch to our blogs.

These simple, short little clips begin to give the audience a better picture of who the blogger is. More importantly, the tools were so unbelievably simple to use, that it makes it painless to update. I think I was actually caught off-guard by the simplicity of both Animoto and VT.

Animoto
Within 10 minutes, using the pictures I previously uploaded to my PhotoBucket account, I was able to create a 30 second video that would leave my friends and family members thinking I had lost my mind spending so much time to make such a production. My kids sat by my computer asking me to replay it over and over and while they are soon turning only 3 and 5 years old, I could see them (with some direction) being able to create some of their own work. What’s even more amazing is that the integrated nature of the Internet not only allowed me to make this video in 10 minutes, but have it posted to my blog, my Facebook page and my twitter account within seconds. Could you imagine being on a vacation and sending photos back home this way?

Voicethread
My original plan for exploring this was quite complex. After looking at a number of the samples in their library, I thought about actually making this entire post a voicethread itself. I was going to find pictures or take pictures and overlay my voice. I had a very complicated plan. Then I thought about just using some pictures off of my computer to narrate, but I don’t have many of those on my school computer. Next, as I was playing with the tool, I double clicked a PowerPoint presentation I use for our meet the teacher night. Instantly, all 10 or 12 slides loaded in as separate pages.

This, as I say in my voicethread, was an “A HA!” moment for me. I saw other postings that used Smart Notebook, but it never occurred to me that this would load so simply. It actually probably took me longer to find a microphone to do the recording than it took me to make the whole voicethread.


The Professional Level

This week I spoke to some of my staff members that are our early adopters. Having seen some of these multimedia tools at workshops, a couple of teachers have used both of these tools in a very limited way. What’s interesting, and a common theme from the beginning of this course, is that both teachers were quickly reminded how “cool” they originally thought these tools were, but how they had forgot about them because they didn’t use them often enough. I think this harkens back to our very first discussion question about where we thought we would all end up after this course. I still stand by the notion that I think we will take from this general knowledge about many things, but that with the things we find most interesting, we will, on our own go a bit deeper and make those tools part of our set of web skills.

Animoto
For me this tool is a no brainer. My vice principal loses hours of his life each year putting together a PowerPoint presentation for the students at our year end assembly. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. There are usually technical glitches galore. We will easily earn our $30 worth by purchasing access to full length videos. We’ve also had the idea in the past of looking for ways to better share all of the photos that get taken at a school, an Animoto will help us immensely with this. I can see this little tool spreading quickly to classrooms simply because it is so easy to use.

Voicethread
Armed with my new found knowledge about VT, I look forward to sharing this with staff at our school. I could see how it would be so simple to use this tool to share something like our Meet the Teacher night presentation online so that parents that couldn’t attend could still view it, or to take technical things like new IPP software and make a sort of online manual that others could add to as a kind of visual wiki of sorts.
The classroom possibilities here are great as well. Armed with a Smart document camera, students could produce step-by-step instructions on how to do a science experiment. Our grade two students recently went on a walking field trip to the Art Gallery and took along digital cameras. They snapped hundreds of photos demonstrating symmetry, perspective, contrast and other artistic elements. Imagine now if they put that into a voicethread explaining their thinking or why they choose a certain photo?


New Knowledge

Clearly this was a fun week of exploring and while the research out there was limited, the tools themselves were engaging enough to help me sift through my thoughts. The most interesting article I found on these kinds of “mash ups” came from Keith McPherson. He did a great job of outlining some of the advantages and disadvantages of using a program like Animoto. I’ll highlight some of his discussion points here and supplement these with my own thoughts. If you haven’t already read his article, I’ve included the citation below.

Advantages
1. Multimodal Learning – students that learn and/or express themselves better through audio or visual means are going to find an easy to use program like this highly beneficial.
2. Engagement – easy appeal to 21st Century learners and easy of use makes it attractive to all kinds of users.
3. On-line Social Skills – easy to share and embed in other web 2.0 tools and provides an opportunity for educators to engage students in a discussion about being responsible online learners.
4. Ethics – links to Creative Commons engages the students in discussion about ownership of pictures, music, etc. and has them consider what it would be like if others starting “mashing up” your “mash ups.”

Disadvantages
1. Web-based – could also be an advantage because it means you can access this anywhere. As bandwidth improves, this becomes less of an issue, but as the author points out, you are at the mercy of your software and your connection speed.
2. Cost – could be prohibitive to some schools at $30 per user station or $249 overall. I explored the site and they do offer a free “pro account” to non-profits, but it isn’t clear that k-12 fits into that. They need to do some work here.
3. Newness – The article (written last year) points out that there are not a lot of examples of this technology out there yet and for this reason, there are few examples of how this can best connect to curriculum. This is obviously changing, but the challenge remains for many of the early adopters to be really creative with this tool.
4. In-ability to Fine Tune – there is a certain “canned” feeling to each of the mash ups, but obviously there are some technical limitations to what they can do with a web-based application like this. I disagree with the author here on this point (and the next) in that I think if this gets more complicated it drives away users. Keep it simple and those that really like it will move to more complex desktop programs like Adobe to create more complex productions.
5. The author would like to see more interactivity – see my comments in point #4 above.

I’m excited about the prospects of these two simple tools for my school and look forward to using them both administratively to communicate with families and in the library for things like digital book reviews or having students do a Top-Ten Must Reads mash up.

References

Davies, J. & Merchant, G. (2009). Web 2.0 for schools: Learning and social participation. New York, NY: Lang Publishing.

McPherson, K. (2008). Mashing literacy. Teacher Librarian, 35(5).

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed., p. 90). Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.

With info from:

http://www.teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=7679&title=Animoto_in_your_classroom_Part_2