Animoto Education Program It was love at first sight when I discovered Animoto late last summer, and I’ve had a great deal of fun with it since. I wrote about Animoto back in October, and then in January. The free version of Animoto allows 30-second videos, but after making only a few 30-second creations, I willingly put down the $30 for an “All Access Pass” that allows me to put together and download an unlimited number of “full-length” videos for a period of a year.

Now, teachers are being offered the All Access Pass free of charge, along with the same pass for each class member.

Animoto is an application that allows you to use digital photos to create videos easily and quickly. The shots are “animated” according to the accompanying music that is selected. You can choose from a variety of music tracks built into the program, or you can upload your own sound track. (By uploading your own track, you have the option of including spoken narration.) Finally, if you aren’t satisfied with your movie, you can “re-mix” and create a new and different version with the click of a button.

The potential classroom uses of Animot0 are limited only the imaginations of learners and teachers. Please take a look at Voices of the World, a project where schools from around the world have worked together and used Animoto to share their national anthems. You can also check out an Animoto example, created in the UK by Doug Belshaw to stimulate interest in a secondary school history course.

As an itinerant, I don’t have my own class to work with; but I do present at, or participate in, numerous workshops for adult educators. Sometimes it’s fun to put together an Animoto video to share before the workshop is over. The first embedded example below is from a Linda Burkhart workshop in Vancouver in January. The second example illustrates a personal use of Animoto–to package and share family memories. This one was of a special day we spent recently with our son and grandchildren.

FREE online resources and downloadable programs for learners.

With my focus on free here, this is an unusual post. I’m writing about a paid service today. I don’t think I’ve done that before, and it’s unlikely to happen again in the near future. I’m just such an Animoto fan that I want to share a new service now available from Animoto.

Animoto Downloads are now available as Quicktime MP4 movies. This service, however, is only available for “full length” Animoto videos which cost $3 each, or to those who have paid $30 for a full year of unlimited access. I had so much fun with my initial experience creating the free 30 second Animotos that I plunked down the $30 for a year’s worth of fun. With my “All Access” pass, now I can even download the short videos I made prior to paying for my subscription.

Once downloaded, student created Animotos can now be uploaded and shared on Teachertube. The availability of downloads is also significant for teachers who work in school environments where Animoto is blocked. These teachers can now create Animotos away from school and then bring them into the classroom as video files. Indeed, it is helpful for anyone who wants to be able to share an Animoto when unable to be online. I think it is also helpful in some situations to be able to embed an Animoto as a Youtube or Google video.

I’ve embedded, as a Google Video, the Animoto I created about the four-generation Christmas at Our House this year. I’m proud to show off my children, grandchildren and some of the rest of the extended family who were with us. (If you don’t hear the sound, you may need to adjust the volume slider.)

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-5619068699991177474" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

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

The Read/Write Web offers educators powerful tools that I believe should not be just optional extras in our schools. Too many of our students simply do not have adequate aptitude for traditional academic skills, and there are other learners who will never be engaged if we just keep doing what we’ve always done. I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I say that Web 2.0 tools provide practical keys to success for some of our learners. So, here’s a free opportunity to learn how we as educators can expand our boundaries so that we better meet the needs of all our students.

K12 Online Conference–Again (online resource) I believe this conference is such a terrific opportunity that I decided to do a reminder post about it. The pre-conference Keynote Address by David Warlick is scheduled for 5:00 am (on the Pacific Coast) tomorrow (Monday). That means it will be available to us any time after that. It’s entitled “Inventing New Boundaries”, and it’s bound to whet our appetites for the 40 sessions which are scheduled between Oct. 15th and 26th.

I’ve just gone back and sat through the keynote David delivered for the inaugural K12 Online Conference in 2006. That’s what has left me feeling inspired about this year’s conference.

I doubt if I could describe it any better than Will Richardson did in a post this morning, so I’ll just quote him here. (If you don’t already read Will’s blog on “learning with the read/write web”, it is definitely worth checking out.)

“Breaking free of traditional conferences, the upcoming K-12 Online Conference: Playing with Boundaries (October 15-19th & October 22-26th) provides educators with an engaging, ongoing learning experience without time constraints. The K12 Online Conference is a unique professional development opportunity for teachers to engage with ideas and technologies that are having a real impact on 21st century classrooms.

The entire conference will be delivered as downloadable digital media via the Internet with over 40 sessions presented in four strands: Classroom 2.0, New Tools, Professional Learning Networks, and Obstacles to Opportunities. The conference launches with a keynote address on October 8th from respected blogger and author David Warlick and concludes with a global 24 hour live event, As Night Falls.

For more information, please visit http://www.k12onlineconference.org.”

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

Web 2.0 applications are proliferating so rapidly that it is impossible to keep up. Many of these applications offer learners and their teachers an amazing new range of readily available resources. These applications enrich learning for all, and they make education more accessible to an ever widening range of learners. The applications of the Read/Write Web also serve to level the playing field because most of them are free to anyone with a computer that is connected to the internet. Today’s featured resource is a great example.

SoundSnap (online resource) Here’s an online community that offers an invaluable free resource to anyone who wants to use sound effects or audio loops in digital projects. SoundSnap is worth checking out, whether you are creating a podcast, a presentation, a website, a science project, or a custom activity for a program like Clicker 5 or Classroom Suite. SoundSnap has literally thousands of well organized and searchable audio files available for download.

Click on the thumbnail below to view the 16 main headings under which the sound files are organized. You’ll also see the total number of files currently available under each heading. (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it, and use your browser’s back arrow to return to this page.)

The next thumbnail is for a screenshot that shows the download interface. You’ll notice that you have the option of listening to a clip before deciding whether or not to download. You are told the duration of the clip. You can see how many times the file has already been downloaded and how it has been rated by other users. At the top of this screenshot, you see the sub-headings under the major category of Animals.

If you have audio files that you would like to contribute, SoundSnap would welcome them.

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The purpose of this blog is to highlight free downloadable programs and online resources of good quality that may be of value to educators and their students, especially those involved in special education.

Here’s a great resource for folks with hearing impairment as well as for language learners and their teachers.

dotSUB (online resource) Video is a powerful online medium that seems to be experiencing exponential growth. Now dotSUB makes online video accessible to an even wider audience. When you upload a video to dotSUB, you can then add subtitles simply by typing them into a straightforward interface.

dotSUB provides a tremendous service for anyone who is hearing impaired. But that’s not all! Once subtitles have been added to a video, the subtitles can be translated into any other language by anyone who is a bilingual translator.

dotSUB has made it easy to link and/or embed videos. Unfortunately, the embedding doesn’t yet work here in edublogs. For a terrific demonstration and explanation of dotSUB, check out the April 26 edition of Rocketboom. [NOTE: Once you get to Rocketboom, you have to click on the image before the video will start streaming.] Incidentally, Rocketboom is regularly sub-tititled and translated. Here’s a screenshot for a glimpse of what you get at dotSUB. (Click on the thumbnail to enlarge.)

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Today’s featured resource is elegant in its simplicity, while offering limitless potential. As I see it, Scrapblog is yet another UDL tool that should be in every teacher’s tool kit.

Scrapblog (online resource) This is an online multi-media authoring platform for creatively organizing, presenting and sharing digital media. You can combine photos, audio, video and text in almost any way imaginable. For a fairly thorough overview of Scrapblog, it’s worth taking the Quick Tour that is available on the home page.

Scrapblog offers students a creative way to present and share what they learn. It also gives teachers a quick and convenient way of presenting material digitally, with tremendous potential for engaging students. Here’s an example of an audio-visual Scrapblog on the life and work of ee cummings. (To hear the audio, be sure to allow the entire Scrapblog to download before playing it, and remember that you can pause it whenever it goes too fast for you to read all the text on a page.) Of course, there is also the autobiographical option of using Scrapblog for personal audio-visual blogging.

The intuitive user interface of Scrapblog allows you to be as creative as you wish. You can use one of numerous available themes, or you can create your own pages completely from scratch. For example, backgrounds, borders, frames and callouts are a snap to add and customize. It is also easy to add music and/or narration to a Scrapblog.

The “Scrapblog Builder” offers the user an amazing range of options, and it couldn’t be easier to use. Photos and videos are simply dragged and dropped on a page. Once on the page, images can be resized and positioned as desired. For photos, there is even the opportunity to do basic photo-edits right on the page. Click to enlarge the screenshot below of the Scrapblog Builder. (Use your browser’s back button to return to this page.)

Each Scrapblog is assigned a unique URL that can either have restricted access or be available to the public. A Scrapblog may consist of as many pages as you wish, and objects on a page can be linked to other pages in the Scrapblog. As an added bonus, Scrapblogs can also be printed. This gives you the ability to use Scrapblog to create books, cards and DVD’s.

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As I wrote in a post last June, I’ve been a loyal Winamp user since Justin Frankel first put it out back in 1996. Now that I’ve discovered the VLC Media Player, I think I’m finally ready to move on. Although I didn’t know I was looking for it, VLC is the superior media player I’ve been waiting for. I don’t think you can go wrong with this one.

VLC Media Player (downloadable program) This is a cross platform open source media player that works flawlessly with a wide variety of audio and video formats. I have set VLC as my default media player, and so far it hasn’t encountered anything that it can’t handle with ease. The interface is straightforward and unobtrusive. Unlike recent versions of Winamp, there are no features of VCL that have been designed to market anything to me.

The VLC player is extremely versatile. The Wikipedia entry sums this up nicely:

“It is a highly portable multimedia player, encoder, and streamer supporting many audio and video codecs and file formats as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It is able to stream over networks and to transcode multimedia files and save them into various different formats….It is one of the most platform-independent players available, with versions for Linux, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Windows CE…”

In terms of access, the VLC player can be operated with mouse gestures or configurable keyboard commands.

Pivot Stickfigure Animator (downloadable program) This free program enables the user to create simple animated movies. With this program, absolutely anyone has the ability to create animated cartoons. Pivot thereby offers a marvelous opportunity to children who want to express themselves with animated movies.

Here’s an example of something created with Pivot.  It’s been viewed nearly half a million times in the four years since it was uploaded to Youtube.

Pivot Stickfigure Animator includes a variety of ready-made stick figures (stick men, a clock, a horse, an elephant or any letter of the alphabet) that can easily be “animated” as the figure is manipulated into a new position for each new frame. Alternatively, the program allows the user to create stick figures. The movie-maker can add whatever background is desired by importing the appropriate file.

Pivot’s user interface is intuitive and straightforward. The program also allows the animator to preview the movie that is being made at any stage of the process. For a detailed review, that in effect includes instructions on how to use the program, you can go to Softpedia. This is also a good alternative download site.

The screenshot below shows a single frame of an animation in process, and it gives a pretty good idea of the user interface.

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Multi-media projects are increasingly valuable in education for a wide range of purposes. If you are involved in creating and sharing multi-media projects, today’s featured productivity resource may be of interest to you.

SUPER (c) (Downloadable Program) This Windows utility does a great job of converting audio and video file formats. It’s completely free, and it is current. The latest build was released on January 4th, 2007. It is annoying that we need a program like SUPER, but there has been such a proliferation of file formats that files often don’t work with available equipment.

SUPER is easy to use, and almost unbelievably flexible. You simply drag and drop the file you want to convert, then select the required options. No matter what you need by way of audio or video file conversion, it is a fairly safe bet that SUPER will be able to do it for you. All codecs are built in. The trickiest part may well be figuring out exactly what you do need.

I have recently used SUPER successfully to convert a set of wmv files to MPG as well as MP4. I have also used SUPER to create some DVD compliant home movies so they can be watched on a TV with a regular DVD player. Apparently, I’ve just scratched the surface of what SUPER can do. For example, you can extract audio from video or save streaming media from the internet

Although SUPER really is easy to use, it should be noted that the developers have assumed a modicum of computer savvy and experience. If your technological expertise is limited, you may want to find a mentor to help you get started with SUPER. There are no handy help files, and no tutorials that I am aware of. There is a “demonstration” of what the program can do at SUPER’s website.

To download the program, go to http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html.

SUPER runs only in Windows.

Here is a screenshot of SUPER’s user interface. (Click to enlarge image, and use your browser’s “back” button to return to the blog.)

NOTE: The SUPER website does not make it very easy to get to the download link. If you follow the instructions below, you should get there.

1) In the gray bar on the home page (right under the 3 pictures) select Freeware>Super>Download
2) Click on the link “Start Downloading SUPER” which is immediately below the red bar that says “Download and try…”
3) Click on the link that says “download and use”. This is in blue type at the end of the first line of red.
4) Click on the little blue arrow that is just above the red bar that says “Why Choose SUPER?”
5) Select one of the four “Fast Download Sites”.

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I think everyone needs a reliable media player on their PC’s as an alternative to Windows Media Player. When I associate online content with the free program I’m highlighting today from the productivity page, I often find that I get superior results.

Winamp (downloadable program) Winamp has been around for a long time as a popular free MP3 player, and it continues to be one of the best media players available. It now steams video as well as audio, and the latest version supports synchronization with portable devices such as iPod. With Winamp, you have convenient and flexible access to online media. You can customize the interface from a huge selection of skins. Winamp, of course, offers its own music download service. As a bonus, you now get free access to some XM satellite radio channels through Winamp as well.To find out more and to download the program, go to http://www.winamp.com/ You can purchase a “Pro” version of Winamp, but the free program has always worked fine for my needs.

[Winamp was first released as shareware in 1997, when its author, Justin Frankel, was still a teenager. At the age of 20, he sold the program to AOL for $86 million! Fortunately, AOL has continued to support the development of Winamp By the end of 2005, Winamp boasted 55 million monthly users. I have a soft spot in my heart for Winamp because I've used the program almost from its inception in 1997, and it remains my favourite player.]

Winamp runs in Windows only.