This afternoon I gave a brief demonstration of Animoto to a wonderful group of educators in an Ed Tech Teacher workshop. It was the first time that I had used Animoto in about a month or so. When I went to add images to my video, I noticed the new option to import images from your Instagram collection. While I don’t have enough pictures in my Instagram account to make it worth while, this could be a fantastic feature for some people.

Applications for Education
Animoto has long been one of my favorite tools for to show to educators and or students who have never made a video before. It’s easy to get them started and quickly producing nice-looking videos. One of the things that I always stress when I show Animoto to educators is that they need to guard against getting sucked into the visual effects and look for content and process. By that I mean we need to have conversations with students about storyboarding, the symbolism and power of imagery, and the power of sound tracks to influence how we feel about what we see.