My animoto slideshows:
I am happy I have found Animoto and that it is another tool in my technology toolbox. I’ve gotten quite accustomed to Powerpoint and like that a lot. But the problem with Powerpoint is that people get bored so easily with it. When someone gets up in front of a group and opens a powerpoint, you just know what people are thinking: “Here we go...”. Now I don’t think that Animoto is a replacement of Powerpoint. It’s not really a presentation tool outside of the area of displaying pictures and video and music in a fun way. In this area, it’s clearly better than Powerpoint.
Watching a video like this is so visually stimulating that it keeps you guessing at what’s about to fly onto the screen. This builds excitement and keeps interest more than a assembly line style of displaying picture after picture. This would be a great tool for students to “make” a short presentation about themselves. I say “make” because the only hard part is picking and uploading pictures and picking a song. Boohoo. This could be a great, easy way for students to introduce themselves (maybe at the beginning of the year) without taking 10 minutes to do it. Depending on the class size, you could have every student play their Animoto slideshow.
My biggest complaint with Animoto and where I see the biggest limitations is customizability. There’s not much you can do to make a slideshow your own (other than by adding your unique pictures/videos/music). Being used to working with Powerpoint, I am bothered by how little you can change. There are 3 speed settings, one way of adding labels. The music files you upload have to be MP3. If you get pictures from Facebook, it retrieves all the pictures from your album, even if you only want one or two.
Nevertheless, the strength of this program is ease of “creating” a visually exciting slideshow in a fraction of the time it would take you on any customizable program. This would be ideal for classrooms, as tedious and time consuming tasks are a nuisance especially to students who are busy with homework and activities.
