Animoto: digital narrative made easy

A great audiovisual piece of freeware called animoto and I spent most of this wet bleak day fooling around.
Courtesy of Ewan MacIntosh i found animoto, its a bit of an instant digital narrative type of thing.
I found it easiest using photos and pictures uploaded onto flikr first and then onto their upload board.
(Expand the use of pics if needed by doing the Flikr advanced search for creative commons photos, attribution required).
The site then provides an option of music they provide (some free, some on payment) or advice re creative commons music or authors own mp3 file... to accompany.

The 30 sec short clip that can be produced is free, downloadable to youtube and then to one's own blog...
I'm thinking I could use these as a week by week intro to a lecture, or as a reminder of what was covered in the previous lecture...

There are some annoying aspects such as the random actions on slides, but i guess this is made up for with the 'creativity for dummies' ease of use.

Here Ive used graphics from the early part of the course I teach on communication skills (content included getting out of one's comfort zone, developing self awareness, invoking a moral curiosity, the need for communications in a health team to be by design, non-verbal communications, empathy and the work of John Heron, which included a look at unskilled, degenerative and misguided counselling). I suspect this little snippet tries to do too much and i still have to work on the headless one but still...it is my first ever youtube upload :)
The stand alone video wouldnt make sense if you hadn't attended the lecture, but the potential is for grounding aspects of the learning invoked by the visuals ...

Next step, injecting some creativity in the course;
maybe extra course credit for submitting work that exemplifies empathy....