Here’s a web 2.0 tool that could bring some fun into your classroom.  Animoto is an online music-video creation application.  Go to their site, sign up (it’s free), and you can create a short (30 second) music video, using your own digital photos and a song from the animoto library, that can be emailed, downloaded, linked to, or embedded in a web site.

Right now they have a mother’s day special going on.  The animoto creation you make is sent inside a lovely flash-based mother’s day graphic (hard to explain, but it’s pretty). I just put an animoto together for my mom (who, at 70 years old, has completely immersed herself in email and the web – go MOM!) and it was a lot of fun.  Once I found the digital photos I wanted, it only took me about 15 minutes to put it together.  It’s a way to send something nice to your Mom while brushing up on your web 2.0 skills.

Animoto would be a useful tool to consider for student projects (maybe a fun end-of-the-year sort of thing?).  It’s good for setting a mood and giving a content “impression”.  Not so good for presenting a complex topic or a linear progression.  Here are a few biology animotos that might be fun to create… a series of biodiversity animotos?  Or an animoto for each biome?  Animotos of a local nature area?  Student pets?  Gardens?  Your classroom?  Would love to hear your ideas and see what you create.

Here’s a link to one that I put together on Charles Darwin.

You may have already started a blog but here’s another idea to consider – a vlog.  As you can guess from the squished-together way these new technology terms are formed, a “vlog” is a “video blog”.  That is, a form of blogging in which the medium is video.

As a teacher, you might set up a blog site in which your students could post videos on a daily or weekly basis.  Video is a very rich, creative media for students and the possibilities (formats, special effects, lighting techniques, subject matter, stop-action) are endless.

One of the best ways to get ideas for your vlog is to visit other, successful vlogs and see what they are doing.  To that end here are a few of my favorites:

Alive in Baghdad
Excellent vlog with Iraqi journalists posting weekly videos (every Monday), detailing life in Baghdad.  Illustrates the conflict through the voice of Iraqi citizens.

Crooks and Liars
Good political satire.  Pretty well done.

CSPAN
I know, I know…but I think these guys are way ahead of the technology curve with live feeds, editorial coverage, featured guests, and regularly scheduled programming.  An impressive vlog site.

MN Stories
I like this one.  It’s a community vlog featuring all kinds of quirky and interesting human interest stories all about people living in Minnesota.  Note that this site has channels so that you can sort through the vlog by area of interest to you (food, music, art, etc).  For a classroom vlog, you could do the same – that is, set up channels for different content areas or elements of the course.

Sustainable Route
Two young women set out on a 13,000 mile road trip to find sustainable solutions to our environmental problems.  Sort of a Thelma and Louise go green.

So, those are my favorites – what are yours?  Oh, and here is a pretty good tutorial that covers the basics of shooting your video, compression, uploading, posting, and RSS feeds.  Whoosh.