Digital Story
This story is worth telling, as it is a model introduction for students in the Moodle Course I am developing. The pedagogical importance of creating a learning community in courses is paramount (Anderson, 2008). In the Moodle course I am developing, it is a %50 in class and %50 out of class delivery model. The students will see and interact with each other in class but will have to interact online as well. Developing a sense of community in both places, in the classroom and online will be important. This introduction activity is meant to foster that sense of community.
Animoto was the right tool to tell the story as I wanted a tool that was intuitive to use and created a professional looking video quickly. The idea was to highlight personality traits that describe me using words and pictures. I had very few technical issues and was able to focus on the content rather than worry about learning the bells and whistles of the program.
The strength of the story telling approach, Animoto, is that it reduces the amount of decisions need to be made in creating a video. We have all had students who spent too much time on transitions in PowerPoint and spent too little time on the content. I like Animoto because you can focus on the content and let the program create the transitions.
The second strength of Animoto is the music selection. When I have used PhotoStory 3 in the past, the limitation was the music. There were many assignments that I asked students to remove the illegal audio track so that their Digital Story could be shared in a public space. I am hoping that this affordance of Animoto will reduce this issue.
One limitation of Animoto is that text and pictures cannot be simultaneously displayed in an overlay. If you wanted an overlay of text on a picture you would need to create it in a third party software. A second limitation of Animoto is that if you wanted to create a voice over you would also have to use a third party software, like Audacity or Garageband, to create a soundtrack. Then you would import the soundtrack into Animoto. If either of these limitations are integral or necessary to your Digital Story, I would consider another Web 2.0 tool.
Reference
Anderson, T. (2008). Teaching in an online learning context. In: Anderson, T. & Elloumi, F. Theory and practice of online learning. Athabasca University. Retrieved June 12, 2011 from http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/14_Anderson_2008_Anderson-DeliveryQualitySupport.pdf