Free Resources from the Net for (Special) Education

Welcome to this Treasure Chest of Free Stuff.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners and their teachers.

I’ve just arrived home from Closing the Gap. It will take a while to process everything I experienced and learned in Minneapolis. I do know that I was very impressed with Version 4 of Classroom Suite, which was launched at the conference. This new product from Intellitools has incorporated something called “smart scanning”, and this will make a huge difference to learners who use switches for step scanning!

As for free resources, I was introduced to so many great new options that it will take me a long time to put up posts even of the best of the best. I already have a huge backlog of free resources that I want to share. It was a special treat to attend the presentations on free internet resources by Paula Walser from Wisconsin and by Sigudur Jonsson from Iceland. It is definitely hard to keep up with all the terrific stuff that is out there! Today’s post is about Animoto. I’ve been having fun with this since the summer, and I’ve been meaning to write about it since then.

Animoto (online resource) Here’s yet another nifty Web 2.0 opportunity for digital story-telling. This one is a lot of fun and will engage plenty of learners, as well as many of their teachers. With Animoto, you can combine a set of still photos with a music track to create a free 30 second video with considerable dramatic flare. Here’s something I threw together very quickly to play just before our presentation at Closing the Gap. It ends by contrasting the hard working member of our presentation team with the other guy.

You can select from 3 genres of music provided by Animoto (indie rock, electronica, hip hop). The application then blends the music with the way it presents the pictures. Or, you can upload your own music track. If you’re not entirely happy with the way it comes out, you can “re-mix” the video with touch of a button for something completely different. If you wish, you have the option of adding or deleting photos or of changing the order.

Animoto does not offer an option for including voice narration, but there’s nothing to stop you from mixing voice with a music track in Audacity and then uploading that.

Photos can be uploaded from your computer, or imported from online hosts. Animoto has provide quick links for importing pictures from flickr, facebook, smugmug and photobucket.

Of course, Animoto has made it easy to share whatever you create by offering a unique URL for each creation. Sharing work online is often powerfully motivating for the learners we work with. The embed code makes it easy to embed an Animoto video in a blog or on a wiki. There is also a “Post Online” feature which makes it easy to post your video to MySpace, FaceBook or Friendster.

Here’s one of the first Animoto videos I put together. It shows my wife Lynn taking pictures while we were exploring the California coast in August. I called it “Clickin’ with Lynn” and I used a music track provided by Animoto, entitled “Picture in My Head”.

If you wish to make a “full length” video (about 3 and a half minutes), you can do so for $3.00. A one year subscription that allows you to make as many full length videos as you wish costs $30.