Telling a Story- Creating Poems with Animoto

August 22, 2009 - Digital Storytelling

There is a growing list of incredible sites and tools to give wings to our and our students’ creativity in telling stories. These stories can be poems, voice, text, video, music and so much more, only limited by our own creativity.
Last year I concentrated on exploring tools such as

In addition to these tools, take a look at

Here is my attempt to convert a poem by Jorge Luis Borges into an Animoto music video with my images.

  1. First I picked a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, that spoke to me.
  2. Segmented the poem and typed the words separately onto different slides into PowerPoint
  3. Changed fonts style and background color
  4. Saved the slides as individual pictures *( You might have to go into “Options” to make sure it exports ALL the slides not just your selected slide)
  5. Uploaded these slides into animoto
  6. Uploaded images that connected the words and the feeling of the poem for me
  7. Arranged images in order
  8. Uploaded  Creative Commons MP3 music
  9. Finalized the movie

Animoto-Poem1

Animoto-Poem2

animoto 3

animoto2

Instead of typing the text in PowerPoint, I have seen students just write the words on pieces of paper and then take a digital image of that paper to upload. It is also worth checking out thousands of images of Words on Flickr, that could be used in telling a story via Animoto.

Flickr_ The Single Word Pool

Also check out the blog post on Simply Teaching: Creating Videos from Student Poetry with great example videos.

Here is my Animoto embedded video: