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Sunday, February 26, 2012
Animoto
Okay, so here is my attempt at creating a video in Animoto. My first foray amounted to nothing more than goofing around with a timeline of my kids' pictures. This is nothing fancy, mind you, just an adventure into the medium.
A few weeks ago I was asked to work with third graders on a daily basis to help prepare for CMTs. I've been doing guided reading group push-ins and math pull outs. In math we just started working on geometric shapes and how to differentiate between polygons. I gave the students thirty rectangular-shaped card stock pieces of paper--ten in neon pink with names of shapes (triangle, square, rectangle, etc.), ten in yellow with a line drawing of a shape, and ten lime green with a description of a shape. I then asked the students to sort the card stock pieces into ten columns with three rows. Each column should have one pink piece of card stock at the top, one yellow card in the middle and one green card at the bottom. Only the highest math group could adequately sort the shape descriptions in the first session; the lowest academic group took three half hour sessions to fully sort the cards and understand the meaning behind the activity. I thought creating this short video segment showing real-life applications of geometric shapes as well as their properties might help my lowest students.
One major drawback I found in Animoto was the limiting amount of text allowed for each photo. I wanted to include the same descriptions in my Animoto video as I did on my green card stock (for example, one pink card says "Rectangle," the yellow card has a line drawing of a rectangle and the green card says, "I am a polygon with 4 sides and 4 square angles. My sides do not have to be equal.") However, the first line of text in Animoto is the "header" and it only allows 22 characters; the second line is for "text" and allows 30 characters. That isn't nearly enough space; I can't condense many of my descriptions into 30 characters. To be that limiting is very frustrating.
I'm hoping that this little video with its catchy tune will be just enough to grab my small math group's interest and help them to remember the properties of the shapes included in it when they start taking their CMTs next week.
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Lisa, I too, had a tough time dealing with the limited amount of text that was allowed in the animoto video. I of course have never heard of animoto before this class. After playing around with it, I began to get discouraged with how the final product was goi g to come out, but in the end, I felt that it did the job. I am by no means in an advanced level of using animoto, but I did have fun putting it together, and my class really enjoyed viewing it in the classroom and reflecting on the learning experience from the field trip to the science center.
ReplyDeleteI will be showing this and making a sequel (with your permission of course). Extremely relevant to my teaching right now!!! Thank you!
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of applying the terms to objects that are a part of their daily lives. I also did not appreciate the lack of space of text. I also had no choice about which segment of my videos would show in the video clip. Overall, I love the videos everyone has shared, but I wonder how much more we could do with more control over things like text limits and video time-frames?!?
ReplyDeleteAwesome video! Great way to reinforce these concepts!
ReplyDeleteI really like your video! Great job!!! The music made the video very fun and interesting! I also found the amount of text we were allowed to add limiting. I felt like my video would have been a little better if I could have had more words on the screen.
ReplyDeleteHi! My name is Claire and I am from that class in NE that you are collaborating with :)
ReplyDeleteI knew nothing about animoto before watching your video, and it looks like an pretty interesting tool! I too would be frustrated with the text limits, however. It is unfortunate that you had to abbreviate words to make it all fit. Maybe a tool like imovie could give you the same effect without the limit of the text? Because I agree that it would be very valuable to use the same wording as you had on your cards (which sounded like a great idea, by the way!) Regardless, I think you did a good job making it work!
In other news, I really liked the photos that you used! Picking things that your students see often makes this subject more meaningful to them, and probably helps them remember the shapes better! Also, it would be fun to have your students make their own version at the end of your unit on shapes!
That was a good idea to make an animoto to help teach shapes. I teach kindergarten so I'm always looking for new ways for my students to understand these concepts.
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