Revisiting an old friend

I got acquainted with Animoto about a month ago, but I didn't have a great first impression.  I was trying to create a video slideshow for my husband's grandfather's 100th birthday party.  But, it's kind of hard to capture his life in 30 seconds! Then, I realized that there is more to Animoto than meets the eye: there's Animoto for Educators.  So, I took the pictures I scanned, and started again.  In a very short amount of time, I was able to produce the video embedded below.  

In the end, we didn't show this video at his party.  My husband had already created one using iMovie.  When I compare what I did to what my husband did, I can easily say that he invested a lot more time in his video.  However, iMovie was new to him.  Even so, Animoto is easier to use.  I think the perk with iMovie, though, is that you can customize your video in more ways than you can with Animoto.

If I were going to ask the students at Mission Hill Elementary School to create a video slideshow, I would definitely encourage them to use Animoto because there isn't a steep learning curve and the final product looks very polished!  I think students would be proud of their work.  In fact, I'm thinking of recommending Animoto to our principal who likes to create slideshows for assemblies.  For me, I would like to use Animoto to post on our school library's website.  I would love to take photos throughout the year of activities that take place in the library.  I just have to make sure that I'm allowed to post students' photos on our webpage first.  

Final thought: I'm keeping in touch with Animoto!