Animoto

http://animoto.com

Price = Free!

I have always been a gadget lover.  I am definitely an early adopter of new technologies.  However, I did not start thinking a lot about the educational uses of technology until I learned about something called Digital Storytelling.  About seven years ago, one of my colleagues in the Communications department at UVa-Wise, Amy Clark, gave a presentation to all of the professors who were planning to teach the 1st year, freshman seminar course at the College.  During the talk she provided us with a variety of ways to promote writing in our classes, and Digital Storytelling was one of the methods she introduced.  I was immediately intrigued because I could see how it would benefit language learners by promoting writing and speaking in a very personal way; by telling a story.  I began doing some research into the process and came across this webpage from the University of Houston: http://digitalstorytelling.coe.uh.edu/

I began to ask my students to produce digital stories about their weekend, a trip they took, their semester, their family, etc.  These ended up being about 2 minutes long and required a process of writing drafts and revisions followed by adding photos and recorded narration to a program that created the video.  It's a great process and my students have been making videos for about six years in all of my classes.  At first, before I had tested it out, the technical requirements added a lot of extraneous cognitive load to the activity, but now that I can anticipate the difficulties that might arise, I have really streamlined the process so that the students can focus on writing and recording the story in the target language as opposed to struggling with the technology.  

I will discuss the longer video creation apps in a later post.  This current post is actually on Animoto, a webpage and now an APP that creates very short, video slide shows with text-based narration.  This is a project that students can complete in less than one class period and it only requires a device with access to the Internet: a computer, a tablet, a phone, or an iPod.  It very definitely works in a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) classroom, and is ideal for classes with 1:1 technology.  Basically, you upload around 5 or 6 photos from a variety of sources such as the Internet, your device's hard drive, your Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa accounts, or from the Animoto photo collection.  Unfortunately, the app doesn't provide the same access to your online photo collections, so if you are using the app you'll need to save the photos you want to the device in advance.  Once the photos are uploaded you can add text boxes to narrate the photos.  I have my online students create an autobiographical video in the target language with Animoto and it's a great icebreaker/getting to know you activity.  

Animoto is free IF you are willing to create videos that are 30 seconds or less.  There is also a limit on the number of characters you can write in each text box, although this number just increased a bit.  I actually see the time limit as an advantage.  It's very easy to want to include way too much when you're making a video, especially one about yourself, so the time limit encourages economy and it makes you choose only the most important things that you wish to communicate.  It also makes it the perfect project to do in one class period.  As for the character limitation, if our students use Twitter then they have already  been trained to conform to a character limit, so I don't think they even think twice.  It is also useful in beginning and intermediate classes because it keeps the novice from trying to use language that is beyond their current capabilities (not that this is necessarily a bad thing but it can cause frustration if they can't express themselves) by requiring them to keep it short and sweet.

Once the videos are created there are a ton of ways that they can be shared.  There are share links to all of the social media sites; recently they even added a Pinterest share option!  It can be shared via email with the link and they provide HTML code that can be copied and used on a webpage (I use wikispaces.com).  Here's my latest autobiographical video!

Try our video maker at Animoto.

Dropbox saved the paper I'm supposed to be writing right now

Dropbox

Price = Free!

On Saturday my daughter spilled an entire glass of sweet tea on my laptop, causing it to turn off and it has not restarted (stifled sob). As an online student and an online instructor you can imagine my close proximity to nervous breakdown. It has dried, with lovely sugar crystal crunchiness, and has a date with an Apple genius tomorrow evening who will no doubt tell me it is wrecked.  I am hopeful that the hard drive will be salvageable; first world problems.  No laptop.  I have had to download a few apps to my iPad so that I can attend my classes via video conferencing, and I am typing this blog on the touch screen of that same tool.  I was mid-research on a literature review dealing with, you guessed it, studies involving iPads in education when this occurred, and thanks to some foresight, and an app called Dropbox I have pdf copies of all of the articles I found in a nice tidy folder that I can access from my iPad, iPhone, and from my computer (sniff).  I also have all of the syllabi, articles, and written assignments from two years of Phd coursework, as well as a variety of shared folders with friends, family, and colleagues.

So, how is this a useful tool for educators?  Um, let me count the bajillion ways.  If your students have Internet access at any point during the day, you can create shared folders to store class assignments, photos, videos, you name it.  These could be organized by chapter, by unit, by topic, etc.  if you are lucky enough to have some kind of mobile technology in the classroom (smart phones or tablets) then dropbox has an app for that device.  If you have a classroom set of these devices they could all be synced to have the same content in their dropboxes.  However, this is really an app that is helping to shape the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement.  Unlike the Amazon, Google, or Apple renditions of cloud storage and sharing, this is accessible from any device under the sun.  If your students have Internet access at home, Dropbox could facilitate collaborative learning by housing group assignments and folders, not unlike a wiki or a google doc (stay tuned for more on these). Assignments could be posted and completed here.  Each student could have their own folder where they complete assignments.  Best part: it's free and you can grow your storage space by inviting others to join.

As a graduate student I have fully adopted a paperless lifestyle.  No more huge files of articles I've read that inevitably get stepped or spilled on (shedding a few tears).  I have my iPad and my Dropbox.  Hundreds of articles in nice neat folders, labeled and everything.  Moving documents between folders is super easy, and this week sans laptop has shown me that I can access my library and EBSCO from the iPad and save articles directly to the Dropbox app.

There might be a slight learning curve for those who have never experienced cloud storage, but there are lovely tutorials to help you get started: https://www.dropbox.com/tour. This one little app has seriously made research, writing, and collaboration so much more efficient and streamlined.