Consumers want something that takes the difficulty out of an engaging slideshow but difficulty is essential to learning. Do you see how the goals of Animoto’s founders and those of teachers are fundamentally at odds?

Blogged this one at length awhile back.

1) It remains possible for a technology to be wicked cool and useless as a learning environment at the same time.

2) You continue to be euphoric about any and all hardware & software while blaming teachers for the efficacy of its use. This ignores the fact that technology has a trajectory, a designed dominant intent if you will. It is in fact possible to hammer a nail with a trumpet, but that is not an argument for classroom trumpets.

3) I assume that people read your blog and look to you for leadership. Therefore, why not advocate for the richest highest-level uses of technology you can imagine? Wouldn’t that raise the bar for everyone? The advocate everything approach you advocate (with the bad teacher caveat included) justifies mediocre practices in the hope that something magically will happen later.

4) Cheap & easy are terrible justifications for any educational action and typically result in cheap and easy results.

5) I’ll ask again, is there any software or hardware you would recommend against for use in a classroom?

Here’s a more interesting challenge - have kids make an “Animoto style” video themselves with any video editor you have access to.

To do this, they will have to dissect what it is about the timing, transitions, and editing that make the videos exciting, powerful, boring, or whatever they see in them. And maybe they will see different things than you do. Why are some videos that pop out of the Amimoto toaster “better” than others? They should be trying to figure out what makes a video happy or sad, what makes you go “awwww”, what makes you jump out of your seat. And then try to do it themselves by playing with timing, transitions, mood effects, music, etc.

Maybe every student can edit and score their own video out of the same folder of photos, and compare them with the other students. Maybe everyone can choose a emotion to illustrate, and see if the other students can guess what they were going for. That way every student can choose to make a sad story, a happy story, a scary story, a funny story, etc.

That way students can see the power of editing to create emotional response in an audience — and experience it for themselves.

I’ll take this on as a personal challenge in the months ahead to see if I can find a way to work with students, and see if we can use Animoto in its current iteration to create some meaningful digital stories. Perhaps you’ll be right and it will be impossible. We’ll see.

After you’ve seen two or three of these things, the thrill is gone.

Sylvia, the students had to decide what went into their video as slides and find supporting images for their 45-60 second video. They had to decide what was important, how to support it with images, decide on the audio script as well as what information could be presented in the PowerPoint slides. They had the ability to organize the layout of the slides of the PowerPoint as well as the images. Each of them recorded their script using Audacity and had to have background music that supported or did not distract from the project. I think it was a great introduction to using Web2.0 and opened up doors for further investigation and groundwork for these students.
As Wes says “Animoto permits students as well as teachers to create some engaging videos, but ultimately the same responsibility for appropriate and effective uses of a learning tool applies to this website just as it does to a pencil or a pair of scissors. HOW will we use this tool?” They DO much more than just click a button depending on how you design the project.

I’m at a loss to see why you think Animoto is “inherently valuable” when the tool is specifically designed to eliminate the possibility of “thoughtful and purposeful creation”. Putting photos in a folder and clicking a button is not purposeful or thoughtful. What meaning can be attributed to a video that is automatically generated?

Sure, it makes cool videos. But the user is deprived of the storytelling experience, of learning how to create a mood, how to use sound to support it, or learning how editing can make a video better. What is left for the user to learn? What does the user DO besides click a button? All the potential educational benefits of digital storytelling are completely lost.

I think cool tools are fine. I’m happy the fine folks at Animoto Inc. like teachers. But to to call clicking a button an educational experience seems like quite a stretch.