Hi, It's now about 8:00 on Wed. night, and I've been playing with videos since class. So, here's one of the things that you need to watch out for - playing with videos, web sites, and blogs can take more time than you realize. In class, I was working with Animoto (or whatever it's called)and I made a video of my class erupting volcanoes (volcanoes are part of the third grade curriculum). I found that if you tried to download more than one picture at a time, the system froze, and the dreaded "little man" showed up. This caused me to have to exit out of the program, force the system to "end the task", and start all over again. With that particular program, adding one picture at a time works much better. Also, with that program, I liked the music selection better. I was able to finish a video (with 12 pictures) that I wanted to post on my blog, but I couldn't seem to remember how to post it. If I had had more time, I probably would have figured it out, but I got totally frustrated.
Then, when I came home I decided to try windows movie maker. That seemed like a much more user friendly system. I was able to make a video, with probably at least 20 pictures, add music to it, publish it, and add it to my wiki site (fun in third grade). I was pretty pleased with myself for being able to do all of that. However, I truly didn't like the music that windows movie maker had. How can I get a better choice of music on windows movie maker? I think that my kids (not the students in my class, but my own 21 year old daughter and almost 19 year old son) would laugh at me because I don't know how to download i-tunes or whatever, but I don't know how. So, how do you get better music to be added to windows movie maker? Also, I wasn't sure how to end the windows video. My pictures ended, but the song continued, as did a blank black video. How do you stop the video when you are done adding pictures? Anyway, it was definitley an educational process, and I would give it another try.