Substitute Work (Continued)

My Web 2.0 tool is Animoto, and basically, what it does is create short presentations. It offers a variety of things, including royalty free images, music and video clips - this allows people to avoid plagiarism. It also allows for students to focus more on the content of their presentation rather than the technology aspect of it, thus the design of the presentations are pretty basic. 

Animoto Home Page

Animoto is great for everyone, but especially for students & teachers because educational accounts are private, unless emailed to a parent or linked to from another site. Animoto will send you an email when your presentation is fully processed and ready to go. Teachers have unlimited access to all of the site's resources FOR FREE, and teachers can also establish group accounts in order to monitor students' work. Another benefit for teachers is that teachers can create quick videos about the upcoming lesson or unit with Animoto. 

              One bad thing about Animoto is that you have to pay a fee every month or year, whatever you prefer, in order to access the full benefits, like being able to create videos as long as you want them to be instead of only 30 seconds long. Sometimes most students, especially students in middle or high school, need presentations to be longer than 30 seconds. On the plus side, if videos can only be 30 seconds long, other students viewing the presentation won't get bored so quickly. 

                                          This web 2.0 tool can be very useful to students because of all the reasons I explained in the previous paragraphs, but also because the video, audio and textual elements in producing videos helps students with creating visual messages and assist with visual literacy skills.  Animoto allows students to develop 21st century learning skills by being able to critically evaluate each presentation.