Student Project #3

Check out this link to my latest student project. I had them make animoto videos to present about the six kindgoms (Animal, Plant, Fungi...). This was an exciting way to learn about classification (way more exciting than having to listen to me lecture about it, or reading about it in our textbook!!!) Students researched different kingdoms and created videos, then presented and took notes from each others presentations.


***An additional reflection about the project: Students loved watching each others presentations (they liked seeing what music their friends picked, and enjoyed the different pictures and styles). I really liked that I had about 3-4 students make a video on the same topic, then I asked my students to take notes while watching. Since they go fast, it's impossible to take all the notes from one video, so they really needed to watch all 3 videos to get everything.
One thing I'll remind my students about is spelling. Animoto doesn't have a spell check, and incorrectly spelled words stick out on their video. I think some of my students tend to be careless about spelling on the computer because they think spell check will catch it, but not the case with animoto.

Animoto

Thing #13 - that awesome new video at the top of my blog! This is a pretty cool site. I'd love to make some bio related videos, even just the 30 second ones to show to my kids. They'd be great to use to introduce a lesson, or to promote a team, or event. It would also be cool for kids to make these. The only thing I had trouble with was the music. It wouldn't let me upload any of my own files, and their music choices were limited. It was easy to put my video in my blog, but it took a few tries to get it on my Ning. I think I finally got it working though :) Enjoy.