Exploring video tools

This week we were tasked with exploring different video tools availabe on computers or phones/tablets.  I was able to explore animoto, pixiclip, wideo, and powtoon.  Unfortunatly, the only app available on my phone was tellagami and it wouldn't download correctly. 

The tool that I found most user friendly and least time consuming was Animoto.  I created a short video using pictures of some of my daughters school/art work from this past school year.  I can definitely see using Animoto during a presentation to parents to show off student work as well as having older students use the tool to create a portfolio of their work throughout the year.  Animoto would also be a good for a display of student work on a school/library/teacher webpage.  As a teacher, it would be great to take pictures throughout the year and then at the end of the year put them into an animoto video to show to the students on one of the last days of school and/or share with the parents.

http://animoto.com/play/exAFB08zgAIjNLEaBwCt8Q

I played around with Pixiclip for a little while but didn't do to much on that site.  I found it hard to draw and make it look like something versus a bunch of squiggly lines.  I can see how it would be useful for creating tutorials and art teachers would be able to use pixiclip to pre-draw something and they can stop the video at certain points to let the kids take it step by step.

Wideo looked really interesting, there were a lot of templates that would be fun to manipulate but I had a hard time getting the site to work.  It kept telling me that I needed get Adobe Flashplayer but I already have the latest version of flashplayer.  Then when I was able to see the templates and I would click edit, it would take me to a preview screen that wanted me to download the mp4 version of the video or share it on social networking sites.  I hadn't made any of the edits to the original template nor could I figure out how, so I did not download or share. 

I really enjoyed Powtoon and think the students would have the most fun with this tool.  There are so many options for templates and icons/pictures to use within the templates.  I do wish there were more pictures to pull from without purchasing a subscription but some really cute things can be done with what is available.  Using powtoon the students can create cards, give facts about a presentation/topic, create their own student resume, or create a video to use for a student "election" like SCA.  One of the templates "Give Advice" would be fun to use at the end of the year for students to come up with advice for next years class.  The students could work together to come up with ideas and it could be something for me to show the next class at the beginning of the following school year.  The facts template could also be used to create a project for almost any of the content areas where students have to present facts. 

http://www.powtoon.com/p/bphgbL5Ew7q/

I can't wait to play around with these tools a little more and hope to include 1-2 of these on my "library website" assignment.