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.