Animoto Book Trailer Resources

Based on what I have seen from other teachers, I decided it was a good idea to have the students design a rough draft storyboard prior to beginning the Animoto project.  I really emphasized that word choice is critical when using Animoto because text is limited.   We talked about how a few carefully chosen words or phrases can be powerful especially when combined with images, animation themes, pacing and music that fits the mood of their book. 
 In addition to showing them how to use Animoto to include text, we worked on adding Powerpoint to our presentations.  Students can create a slide and save it as a JPEG image.  After the slides are saved as JPEGs they can be uploaded to Animoto as an image.  I was impressed with myself when I figured that one out :).  We learned a lot of valuable lessons while playing with Powerpoint.  Many of the fonts end up blurry and hard to read when added into Animoto.
Doing this project was also an opportunity to teach my students about the importance of citing sources and copyright.  We are still working on it. :)

This is the storyboard I used with my students. Simple and to the point.

http://booktrailersforall.com/storyboard%20for%20use%20with%20students.pdf

These Websites offer some great resources for designing an Animoto book projects.

ANIMOTO RESOURCES:

http://maconeastlibraryprojects.wikispaces.com/Lesson+Plan+Animoto+Book+Trailers


http://highlandlc.wikispaces.com/Animoto+Book+Trailer+Unit

This website has both student and teacher copies of handouts.  The teacher copy is nice because it offers detailed explanations of what students need to include in each section of the presentation.


https://sites.google.com/site/booktrailersproject/home/rubric

This site has some great ressources, including tutorials that might help you and your students become more comfortable with Animoto.  It even has a rubric to look at to give you a starting point in terms of how you plan on assessing student projects.  In my class this was a project grade and was weighted the same as a exam grade.  For me it was an extremely effective way to assess my students understanding of story elements and plot.