I get distracted easily, especially if there’s a new application. I got this info from one of my Tweet buddy and the app is called Animoto. What is it? Check it out yourself, BUT, if you are in education and if your classroom is interested in using this, you can get the extended service for a year free. Kind of like some other photo slide shows (e.g. Photobucket) but I think it’s a bit more funky with how the music effects the images. Ok, maybe I’m just a bit cheezy {::SMILES}.

What I like about Animoto is that you can grab photos from different locations (Flickr, Facebook, etc.). To test this out, I just grabbed some photos from my Flickr folder. I should have done one with my cards or pages with some jazz, huh? It was so fun and easy. I remember doing a video for my multimedia class years ago (I blew up Idaho’s capital building, ha!). It took me a few days to do something like this (too bad I can’t find the tape - yes, tape!).

Ok, if you’re not into web stuff but want to create a photo slideshow manually and not have to upload anything online, check out Microsoft’s free Photo Story. In education, this can be used to create a digital storybook. One student who’s teaching actually had her students (3rd graders) create the digital story that I assigned as homework. They all had a blast. It’s super easy to do and you can send your file via email. Let your kids have fun and send grandma some cool photo stories.

As a note, I’d like to use more (hip) music in my tuts too but I don’t want to go through the copyright process or pay. There are free music but I have no time to go through them. Maybe one day.