Aug
23
Using Animoto for classroom introductions
August 23, 2009 | Tagged compfight, creative commons, creativity, geography.animoto | 4 Comments
Here in my county in Florida, we’ve just wrapped up the first week of school. It has been a very exciting, fun and productive week. This week, we learned that the study of Geography is not just learning about rivers, mountains, volcanoes and the like, it’s about making connections. These connections can be made with people from all over the world or simply made inside our classroom. Since most of my students are freshman, coming from multiple middle schools, I thought it was important to first begin making those connections between one another.
Each of my students were given a number. Two students were given each number and were asked to pair up. Their first task was to interview each other to find out as many interesting things as they could about one another. They were each given 5 minutes to conduct these interviews. Once the interview answers were compiled, students were asked to find Creative Commons images, mostly using compfight, that best reflected the answers to each of their questions. With these images, they created Animoto videos about the person they interviewed. Instead of them introducing themselves to the class, they would use these videos to introduce their partner to the class.
The project went very smoothly. One of the things I found a bit surprising was how many students had difficulty being creative. This was not because they did not have any creative talent, but a result of them having so few opportunities to express their creativity throughout their school career to this point. Many of them kept asking for my approval even though I told them the only requirement of the project was to make it at least one minute in length. When asked for my opinion, my answer to them was consistently, “This video belongs to you. Use your imagination. When you are happy with the way it looks and sounds, then I’ll be happy with it.”
The end results were excellent. I was fascinated and intrigued by many of the images they chose to represent the answers to the interview questions. This was the first time any of my students had even heard of Animoto. I was shocked that none of my 48 students had ever heard of this amazing creativity tool. I hope they urge their other teachers to use it in their classes…I think they will.
Here are a couple examples of the videos they created:
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