Introducing Go Animate!

Chocolate Pie Pieces by jmlife on GoAnimate

Video Maker - Powered by GoAnimate.

Familiar with Go Animate?  If not, I highly recommend signing up for a free account.  Upon logging in, I took a few minutes to watch a quick and simple tutorial, outlining some video design basics: character selection, setting, narration, gestures, facial expression, transitions, etc.  You want to know what's even better? If you don't want to worry about all of those decisions, Go Animate offers two different video making platforms:

1. Try out Quick Video if you're in a pinch for time.  Simply choose a theme and characters, select a setting, and type in your narration. Nope, you don't even have to record your voice.  Save yourself the cringe :)  The rest is all done for you!  I'd say this is like the animated companion to Animoto.  As always, you have a limited selection of templates to choose from with a free account.
• Note: I tried out this feature a few months back when Judy blogged about it in this post.  Literally, took 2-3 minutes to design a mini digital story.  Might be a powerful (yet easy!) way to introduce the art of digital storytelling to your kiddos.
2.  Full Video Maker boasts many more design features and lends itself to greater "artistic freedom," if you will.  I decided try this out when I designed the above video.  Still, so simple to use.  I'm all about functionality.  The interface is very intuitive -- the program held my hand walked me through each step of the design process.

If I haven't bored you already, please do take a peak at my short (and rather silly!) video introducing yet another fraction conundrum!  This Common Core math is tricky stuff, so we've been encouraged by the district to use technology as a means of hooking students' interests at the onset of a lesson, while setting a problem to guide our inquiry. It's all about application and analysis of those mathematical principles.  My video targets comparing fractions with different denominators, and the notion that  the more pieces you separate the whole into, the smaller each piece is. (Of course, I had to use the classic pie example in this video, particularly because I have a student who is a major pie aficionado.)  We'll see how the kiddos do with this problem!