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.