Creating Viedos with Animoto

Have you ever wondered what to do with all of those pictures on your computer?  If so, there is an online program for you, and its called Animoto.  I have used this program for a number of projects and they are always quick and easy to make.  The first project was for a Valentine's card for my wife which went over very well!  I also created a military video of my career for a veterans event I was involved in (See below).  

Animoto was founded in August 2006 by Jason Hsiao, Brad Jefferson, Steve Clifton and Tom Clifton because of the poor video quality found on the internet (Pattison, 2008). Animoto’s uses a patented Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology which allows users to turn photos, video clips, and music into video slideshows.  The CAI technology cannot be found on other websites sponsoring video input (Summers, 2013).  Animoto has also launched Facebook and iPhone apps, allowing users to create videos using pictures on their mobile phone.  In 2008 Animoto had nearly 750,000 people sign up in three days. At the peak, almost 25,000 people tried Animoto in a single hour. There are now over 8 million people and business that use Animoto to make videos. 

How does Animoto work?
1. Sign up at the Animoto eduction page.  This is the free education account and there are so many more resources than the trial account. 

2.  Once you’ve registered, click the blue CREATE button in the upper-right-hand corner to begin your video. Animoto has two different video builders, so when you click CREATE, you’ll be asked which you’d like to use.  The one that I have used the most, and cost the least, was the Slideshow Video Builder. This product lets you create a slideshow video using one of our more than 100 video styles. You can add licensed music, captions, text slides, photos, and video clips to your slideshow video to make it more dynamic (Animoto, 2018).

3. Preview & Produce. When you’re done building your video, click the PREVIEW VIDEO button in our Slideshow Video Builder or the PREVIEW button in our Marketing Video Builder to review it. If you want to make additional changes, close the preview window, and you’ll go back to editing your work. When it looks just right, click PRODUCE. Your video will be finalized in under a minute, but even if you click away, we’ll send you an email to let you know when it’s finished.

4.  You and your student's videos will be completely private as long as they do not share the URL. The only way someone can find your students work is if they have the video specific URL website or if the student videos are posted on another website.  See security information here.
After you’ve created your first Animoto video, there are dozens of ways to share it. Take a look at some of the many ways you can use your Animoto video once it’s ready. 

How can Animoto help?

1. Engage Students: At the beginning of a lesson teachers can use Animoto and include a video, image, quote, or another link to prior knowledge in your topic for students to respond to.  Students can also make a video about themselves at the beginning of the year to introduce themselves to the class using their own pictures from home. Once teachers get their free account, your students can get free accounts as well, which are linked to the teacher's account.   

2. Explore: Students explore a topic through a collection of resources (articles, videos, infographics, text excerpts, etc.) contained in an Animoto film clip.  

3. Apply and Share: Create an assignment for students to apply what they learn by using Animoto to create, collaborate, and/or connect beyond the classroom. View student work and provide feedback, and/or include a section for students to share work.  Here is a cheat sheet for the best ways to use video in class. 

4. Reflect: Give students an opportunity for digital design process reflection on their learning journey using Animoto to guide students along their learning progression and set new goals.  See YOUTUBE video below on how you can create and use Animoto in your classroom.

What do Teachers say?

One teacher says that "Animoto lets you quickly and easily combine text, images, and videos into beautiful videos. The videos really do look good. Your students will be impressed with what they can create. My friend’s 6 grade wrote short stories for their kindergarten learning buddies. They then created promo commercials for their short stories as a media literacy assignment." 

Another teacher said it was really easy, "Within 10 minutes of messing around, my students were able to create a quick video that included images, videos, and their own custom text message with the default theme music playing in the background. After another five minutes, they figured out how to upload their own images, videos, and background music."

Some things teachers say Animoto cant do.  It won't let teachers or students express their ideas in a complex way. For teachers trying to engage students in digital storytelling, Animoto might not be the best tool; creating a slide show is simple and straightforward, but the ease of use means that you automate a lot of the creative process and don't have much editorial control. The main problem is that you can't adjust transitions; the site syncs them to the rhythm of the song, which is fine for a vacation slide show but has limited potential in the classroom. Also, you can't add your own voice narration, so the emotional resonance of digital storytelling gets lost. 

One of the last reviews I looked at the teacher stated that there is limitations in the size of the presentation, the number of characters you can write for a slide and the limited stock backgrounds and music.  She stated that your best bet for Animoto is to draw on its strengths and recognize its limitations. “For an art project or maybe a book report, it could be useful and engaging. It's certainly fun to create slideshows and satisfying to watch the finished presentations. Also, it's a bit of a primer on video-editing software. Choices are limited, which makes the site easy to use, but it also means the teaching potential is limited. If you're using a lot of video in the classroom, you might be interested in our teaching tips and resources here: Get Students Thinking Critically About Video.”  See how to take your classroom video below!

Summary 

Animoto has many beneficial uses not only in the classroom but personally for individuals establishing a digital footprint.  Because Animoto crosses so many platforms, and so easy to use it is one of the best ways I have found to make brief videos using small video clips and photos on my iPhone.  For longer and more technical videos I would certainly use another video maker.  

For teachers, I can see this process taking a little while to set up their classes to use Animoto. From what I have read, you have to create an account for yourself, and then google alias accounts for your students (basically your Gmail account + alias for each student, which routes the emails to you). Once you've done that your students are able to log-in and use this product for free.  Other than the process, and the length of the videos, this would be a useful tool.  Students can make some great videos using this resource.  I found Flipgrid to be much easier to use as a class resource and the teacher can "Batch set up" the class.   

References

Animoto (2018). From Downloading to Sharing: 21 Creative Ways to Use Your Animoto Video. Retrieved from https://animoto.com/blog/news/downloading-sharing-ways-use-video/

Fitzgerald, M. (2008). Cloud computing: So you don't have to stand still.  The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/technology/25proto.html?_r=0

Pattison, K. (2008). Animoto: The no-infrastructure startup. Fast Company. Retrieved from https://www.fastcompany.com/991347/animoto-no-infrastructure-startup

Summers, N. (2013). Animoto celebrates its fifth birthday with 6 million registered users and new ‘I Love NY’ video style. The Next Web. Retrieved from https://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/14/animoto-celebrates-its-fifth-birthday-with-six-million-users-and-new-i-love-ny-video-style/ 

Remind is a Great way to Connect

As a Principal in K-12, and now as a Dean at the College level, I have often wanted an affordable and secure way to communicate with my staff or students when I needed too. That is now possible with Remind. Remind is a free text messaging platform that helps teachers, students and parents communicate better. I was told about Remind by one of the department chairs on my campus that uses it and I have found that Remind provides a simple to use technology connection with stakeholders in the classroom, at home, or anywhere in between!

What is Remind?Remind was designed to increase parental and student engagement via texting. Teachers, staff and college faculty can group text, or send individual texts to any school stakeholders who choose to receive the communications. Most educators know that increased communication and engagement is linked to increased student performance. One study showed that teacher to parent communication about homework increased homework turn-in by 42%. The study also demonstrated that parent-teacher communication kept students more focused and increased participation (Kraft & Dougherty, 2013). Remind was developed by two brothers Brett and David Kopf with support from Imagine K12 in late 2011 to “tackle what they saw as one of the key problems in primary education: The lack of simple, user-friendly tools that help teachers better communicate with both students — and their parental units.” Today, in spite of how critical effective communication is within the K-12 learning equation, “schools continue to rely on intercoms, PA systems, paper-based permission slips and phone trees. In other words, the same tools they’ve used for 50 years. Remind founders believe that the first step in communication is to reduce the barriers, or make it easy, for parents and teachers to bridge that communication gap and encourage a more regular dialogue between each party” (Empson, 2014). Remind can help educators communicate in a free and easy manner.

Communicate faster. Real-time messaging for your school, group, or just a single person. Schedule reminders ahead of time.

How does Remind work?
Remind is a free text messaging app that helps teachers, students, and parents communicate quickly and efficiently. I started an account to send meeting updates and information to the staff and faculty on my campus. I have found it is much easier than email, and I can send information and news I forgot to send while at work. I have already received positive feedback and this is a tool I intend to use from now on. Remind is a reliable platform and they update the app every two weeks with features that help simplify communication and improve speed and performance (Remind, 2018). Remind provides step by step assistance and was very responsive to my questions. They even provide a professional development presentation to introduce the app to staff, students, parents or district personnel. I give this app my best endorsement and feel that it would help administrators better communicate.

Remind features.
Fast: Messages are sent in real time to an entire class, a small group, or just a single person. You can also schedule announcements ahead of time and attach photos and other files.
Accessible: With Remind, you can send text messages straight to any phone, including flip phones. To reach every family, translate your messages into more than 70 languages before you send.
Effective: Use delivery receipts to see who's reading your messages. If you're organizing an activity like a field trip or event, use Remind to manage the activity and collect funds.
Safe: Cell phone numbers, email addresses, and other contact information stays private on Remind. Remind's guidelines, practices, and features have been designed to protect the safety and security of users and their personal information. Remind has been certified by iKeepSafe for privacy practices related to and COPPA, FERPA. (Remind, 2018)

How can Remind help?
Not only is the app a simple messaging tool for teachers to securely communicate with students and parents in a way that maintains privacy, Remind now includes an activities feature that makes it easier for staff and faculty to coordinate trips, fundraisers, and other events and if in K-12, reach parents for their approval and participation. According to the developer the "activities app" saw a four-time spike in usage in the first month it went live (Konrad, 2016).  Click here to find the top 10 remind uses!

What do people say?
Over 500 GTCC employees or students use Remind based on their website data (Remind, 2018). It is useful to college faculty as most students have phones and bring them to class. All of the faculty I spoke with used Remind weekly to communicate homework, class assignments and basic office hour tasks. Some of the comments were:

• “Remind is quick and easy to use! My students enjoy hearing from me between classes and I get more work turned in on time.”
• “I enjoy this app because I get updates on my son from the teacher and it gives peace of mind.”
• “It works very well. It really keeps me connected to the teachers who use it. It is very quick and easy.”
• “Easy to use & usually reliable... Had a few times my message didn't get sent over the past 2 years, but it's free!”
• “I Love it, it's very easy to communicate with teachers.”

Summary
I started an account to send meeting updates and information to the staff and faculty on my campus. I have found it is much easier than email, and I can send information and news I forgot to send while at work. I have already received positive feedback and this is a tool I intend to use from now on. Remind is a reliable platform and they update the app every two weeks with features that help simplify communication and improve speed and performance (Remind, 2018). Remind provides step by step assistance and was very responsive to my questions. Remind even provides a professional development presentation to introduce the app to staff, students, parents or district personnel. I give this app my best endorsement and feel that it would help administrators better communicate.

References
Konrad, A. (2016). Parent-Teacher App Remind Passes 20 Million Users, Taps Former Bleacher Report Boss As New CEO. Forbes. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2016/09/14/remind-passes-20-million-users-appoints-former-bleacher-report-boss-as-ceo/#7203eb071947

Empson, R. (2014). Red Hot Remind101 Gets $15M from John Doerr to Bring Free, Secure Text Messaging To Teachers. TechCrunch. Recovered from https://beta.techcrunch.com/2014/02/04/remind101-gets-15m-from-john-doerr-to-bring-free-secure-text-messaging-to-teachers/

Kraft, M. A., & Dougherty, S. (2013). The Effect of Teacher-Family Communication on Student Engagement: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment. Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, 6(3), 199-222. Recovered from https://scholar.harvard.edu/mkraft/publications/effect-teacher-family-communication-student-engagement-evidence-randomized-field

Remind (2018). About Remind. San Francisco, CA. Retrieved from https://www.remind.com/about

A New Way to Get Feedback in Your Class with FLIPGRID

While home on a college snow day, after the Martin Luther King holiday, my second grade granddaughter (Katie) sent me a URL web address to view her Flipgrid.  My granddaughter had been out of school for over a week of snow days herself, and her teacher had sent them a Flipgrid assignment while they were out of school.  Each student who had a device or computer were assigned to write a report on Martin Luther King and submit their report orally on the the Flipgrid prompt from home.  I have to admit this was right up Katie's ally, as she had grown up with either a cell phone or an iPad in her hand since she was able to hold one! I came to believe that these devices were an additional appendage of hers. Katie, who is normally very shy found this assignment was not difficult for her as they had been using Flipgrid in their class for the entire year.  Her mom told me that Flip grid has helped her gain confidence and speak up more than she has in the past.   I have to admit she looked like a professional reporter!

A Grid is your classroom or community of learners. Grids have Topics and Topics have a response.

What is Flipgrid

Flipgrid is a video discussion platform used by PreK to PhD educators, students, and classrooms. According to the Flipgrid website, the platform was first created and used by a college professor to engage his classroom because every student brought a phone to class.  This tool is available and useful to all grade levels, and Katie tells me she loves seeing herself and her classmates in the videos.  It is easy to use and teachers just post topics to start discussions and students respond with short videos. Flipgrid is an exciting way to prompt discussion and to assess learning (Flipgrid, 2018).  

Starting a Flipgrid is easy as 1, 2, 3. 
1.  Create a Grid: A grid is your classroom or community of learners. Name it after your class and set the security settings. Only those with the grid URL can find your grid.  Create a Grid for classrooms, school-wide communications, conference/event reflections, or any social community!

2. Add Topics: Topics are the questions, prompts or themes your students discuss. At least 1 topic is required to start, such as class introductions, but you can add unlimited topics throughout the year! Topics can simply be text-based or include a resource such as image, video, giphy, emoji, and attachment. Check out the Topic Discovery Library to find ready-made topics and add right to the Grid!

3. Share with Students: Students do not have to create accounts on Flipgrid. Teachers share the grid URL (Click here to my topic! Respond if you like to see how it works) for easy access on Macs, PCs, or Chromebooks. Students with mobile devices access your grid using the free Flipgrid app.  Once students get the link they can leave video or voice (Flipgrid, 2018).

Applications of Flip Grid

1. Engage Students: At the beginning of a lesson use Flipgrid as a KWL where you can include a video, image, quote, or another link to prior knowledge in your topic for students to respond to.

2. Explore: Students explore a topic through a collection of resources (articles, videos, infographics, text excerpts, etc.) contained in a Flipgrid.

3. Apply and Share: Create an assignment for students to apply what they learn by using Flipgrid to create, collaborate, and/or connect beyond the classroom. View student work and provide feedback, and/or include a section for students to share work.

4. Reflect: Give students an opportunity for digital reflection on their learning journey using Flipgrid to guide students along their learning progression and set new goals (Fahey, 2017).

What Do Teachers Say?

Catherine and Count Basie Middle School, How I Use It: I used Flipgrid as an activity for students to share their opinion on various topics in Health. The video allowed students to create a answer to a question without writing. This was good mode for some of my ELL students that do not have a strong command of the English language to voice their opinion instead of producing a written response. My overall opinion of Flipgrid as a teaching tool is that it is necessary for the new generation of students. Students are able to share their opinion by creating a video response to a topic. Flipgrid is useful in a classroom of struggling readers and writers. I believe that the students that are shy and do not want to participate in class discussions now have a mode to become part of the lesson using Flipgrid.   

Lynn S. Dean of Student Life: Flipgrid can be used in any situation in which you want to hear from students: their responses to a reading, video or discussion; their answers to a content question; their reflections on the completion of an activity or project; their thoughts on a personal topic as part of an advisor program. The user interface is very straightforward for both teacher and student. The teacher creates a grid (probably one for each class) and then posts a question. Students go to the question, take a photo of themselves, and then video record their response to the question. They can view others' responses and "like" them if they choose. There are very clear, specific instructions on the support page, but Flipgrid is so intuitive your students will probably not need it.         

Summary
I found Flipgrid to be effective, an easy way to use technology, and a wonderful way to get feedback from students.  I can see the benefit of sending a Flipgrid link to my college students to get input on a number of topics I am working on.  In my practice link I found that students who were comfortable with technology could easily send a response.  Those who were not proficient in technology (the older folks I sent it too) found it much more difficult.  I think that students should be instructed on how to use the tool and create an account on using their phone.  Like my granddaughter I think it is fun to post videos and I look forward to using this app in the near future.

References
Fahey, S. (2017). Mr. Fahey's Tech. Retrieved From https://faheystech.blogspot.com/2017/

Fahey, S & Moura, K. (2018). The Educators Guide to Flipgrid. Retrieved from https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59887cb1ebbd1aa4144128da/t/59cc075c80bd5ed9e272ed92/1506543456407/Flipgrid+eBook.pdf

Flipgrid (2018). Flipgrid information. Retrieved from https://info.flipgrid.com/

White, N. (2018). Innovations in Education, Nancy's workshop. Retrieved from http://d20innovation.d20blogs.org/category/learning-strategies/