Animoto

The online video creation tool, Animoto, provides a great balance of easy video creation, cost effectiveness (free for a 30 second video, $30.00/year for longer videos) and impressive finished products. You may apply for free upgraded accounts for Education and Non-Profit use.

To create a video, you simply log in to your account, gather your photos and short video clips and upload them to Animoto. You can re-arrange them to show in any order desired, add some text boxes if you like, choose or upload soundtrack, and click the magic button. Done. You will receive an email telling you when your video is done. Then you can share your video with the world. Here is a quick tutorial from Animoto's helpdesk:

 Examples of Animoto creations

 

Turning Text into a Reflection Video

Participants of a book-read on Bishop John Kinney's Catholic Social Teachings Pastoral were asked to submit a word or phrase that came to mind after viewing a video. These texts were then put into PowerPoint (or Keynote for Mac) to stylish them, and then exported as jpg images. Then the images were uploaded to Animoto to create the video, using an Animoto copyright free soundtrack.

Putting Prayers to Pictures

After creating the audio using the free recording program Audacity, we uploaded the file, and then photos taken by Julie Tschida to create a spoken prayer. 

Pursuasion

 Martin Weller's "Why not use Animoto" persuades his colleagues in academia to consider using the tool.

Other Tutorials

Don't forget you can learn more about Animoto and other Web 2.0 tools for Catechesis by going to the Catechesis 2.0 Blog.

Big Huge Labs

Telling our Story can come in so many shapes and sizes... and media!

I think of the Bible, and how many verses, pages, chapters, books... and years of oral storytelling and written storytelling... and then the politics of canon and translations... and on and on, that it took to become the Gift we have today.

At the other extreme, I think of a motivational style poster:

It says so much, so quickly, and a small group can often do a little theological reflection around it. You can also select a verse of the Bible, and create a poster of that, adding your faith to the mix of the faith from which and for which the Bible came to being.

The video below shows how to use the Motivator tool in the online workshop (playground?) environment called Big Huge Labs.

As always, if you have any questions or need any help, call me at 320-252-1021 and I'll see what we can do together.

And don't forget, you can find tutorials and more Web 2.0 information for Catechesis at https://catechesis20.wordpress.com/

-Tim Welch

NACMP Pres

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Big Huge Labs

BigHugeLabs.com

Tagul and Wordle

Fancy that! I was going to do a tutorial on Wordle, but there was some stuff going on with the programming language (Java... not to be confused with Javascript) that broke it.

So I created a tutorial on Tagul, another word cloud generator... only to be tipped off by NACMP Vice-President Richard Drabik that the new version of Java fixed* the problem. So here are tutorials on both of them. Tagul first, because most of us already know Wordle. And, as always, if you have any questions or need any help, call me at 320-252-1021 and I'll see what we can do together.

And don't forget, you can find tutorials and other Web 2.0 information for Catechesis at https://catechesis20.wordpress.com/tag/wordle/

-Tim Welch

NACMP Pres

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Tagul Tutorial

Tagul.com

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Wordle Tutorial 

(might wanna turn down your volume on this one)

Wordle.net

*There is still an anomaly with some platforms and versions. When you click on a menu command, the menu appears, then plays cat and mouse when you try to mouse down it. The solution is to click once on it, then use your keyboard up and down arrows to go to the command you want, then press your enter (or return) key.