Weekly Report & Reflection #10

I had the opportunity to explore a video slideshow maker called Animoto! I found this tool to be very useful for the purpose of making short video presentations. When creating a presentation, it allows users to choose from different background themes and music themes from a list provided by Animoto while also uploading pictures to be used in the slideshow. In addition, text can also be added to the slides along with captions to the uploaded images. In conclusion, this tool can be used as a convenient way to create a short and informative presentations that can be useful when trying to convey a message in schools and in business meetings. It is especially useful for school purposes because it is very user friendly and you will not encounter any setbacks with adding animations or background music as the options are provided on the website. A person who is not great with computer tools can easily create what looks to be a very creative and sophisticated presentation. The only drawback with Animoto is that there are better features available but only if you upgrade your account. In addition, a free user is limited to a 30-second clip while a premium user can create longer presentations. There are also more themes and music available for premium members. Finally, you can edit the duration that you want each slide to display for while as a free user, you cannot control how long each slide is shown for.

Photo copied from: https://pbltech.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/animoto-narrated-slide-shows/

Becoming aware of Animoto will improve my Digital Literacy as I had previously only used Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Drive to create slideshow presentations. Now I can create a short and professional slideshow presentations using tools like Animoto. Tools like Animoto helps me become more knowledgeable in digital literacy. Using Animoto to create my presentation gave me a better understanding of Copyrights and Creative Commons. As mentioned in Sites2See - Copyright for Students, Every image or text extract you use in school materials is subject to copyright. By having to find images online, I have to give credit to the owners of the images and not treat the images as my own. This helped me greatly as I will know to give proper citation when using online images for school assignments.

Photo copied from: http://features.en.softonic.com/16-must-have-apps-for-every-teacher

Tools like Animoto can be added to my PLE. Animoto can be used in my create category. Firstly, it can be used as a web tool that is used for building my knowledge because tools like Animoto provide viewers with knowledge and information in a concise format. For example, an Animoto presentation can introduce you to unfamiliar topics very efficiently within a 30-second presentation through pictures and texts. I did not have much knowledge about Copyrights and Creative Commons but looking at other student's Animoto presentations gave me a better understanding about the topic. Animoto can also help improve my communication skills because there is a certain limit on the amount of text that can be written on each slide meaning that you must be concise while also getting your point across. The 30-second limit also attributes to effective communication. People do not want to read a wall of text on a slideshow presentation. Learning to be very concise (50 characters per slide) and the 30-second limit will make me a better communicator as well. 

Photo copied from: http://www.madamasr.com/file/facebook-logopng

An interesting article from this week was about Facebook was performing psychological test on its users. Facebook tested more than 600,000 users by manipulation of the news feeds. Some users were shown with a lot of positive news feeds while some users were shown with negative news feeds. This ties into Digital Rights and Responsibilities. They wanted to study that if showing friends with positive feeds would make the user more depressed or vice versa. By running these "covert" web experiments, Facebook users do not have a right to Digital Transparency. In this Digital Age, we must be aware of our digital rights that we gave away when we agree to AUPs of websites. For example, Facebook policy states: "We may use the informative we receive about you for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement." We must be aware of these type of controversial tests and what digital rights we give up for these online services.