Digital Storytelling! Woot!

Digital storytelling can be a lot of fun!

This weekend, I was able to experiment using three different pieces of web-based software. My finished products are shown above. The first was made using from Animoto, the second using Scrapblog, and the third using Voicethread. In order to fairly assess them, I tried making the same exact story with all three. I was able to then figure out, to some degree, the strengths and weaknesses of each program.
Animoto provides a great product for the amount of time you have to put into it. I was able to make my 1-minute story in about 30 minutes, and the video quality is pretty cool. The pictures follow the rhythm of the music, and the song selection from the site is diverse. All I really had to do was upload a couple of pictures, pick a song, and hit enter. The limitations of using this software for storytelling is that you really have very little wiggle room as far as what you can do. Your text needs to be a part of your picture, and you can only choose one song. Voice recording isn't possible, unless you managed to make your recording into a song, but that doesn't seem worth the trouble. Overall, I think Animoto is great for capturing kids' attention at the beginning of a lesson, or for introducing students to digital storytelling.
Scrapblog was really frustrating at first. Apparently, either my computer or my Internet connection or both are too slow to load its Scrapblog builder. So, I had to find a computer in a lab in order to complete that story. The program is very similar to Powerpoint, so it's easy to use. They provide you with cool features like shapes and frames for pictures, kind of like a scrapbooking tool kit. Once I started using the program, I found it a lot of fun. You're able to insert video into the presentation, but putting recordings or music into the presentation didn't seem as easy to me as it was with the other software. Also, working with text was somewhat of a hassle, ie. changing size, font, color, etc. The Scrapblog software has many more features than Animoto, but I think that Powerpoint might be an easier and almost as good route to go.
Voicethread is the last software I used. (Actually, it was the second because Scrapblog was such an inconvenience, but...anyway.) Voicethread made recording narration a piece of cake. I uploaded my pictures, put them in order, and then commented on them. The software allows for a variety of ways of commenting, but I wish it were able to do simultaneous commenting so that I could type and speakat the same time. It would be fairly simple to explain a lesson using this software, and that's definitely a plus. There aren't as many gizmos and gadgets as Scrapblog, nor is there cool animation like Animoto, but I think Voicethread is the most practical. It provides enough tools to be useful and keeps things easy enough.
Overall, I think if I want to do a quick intro to a topic, I'll use Animoto. If I want to explain something a little more or have more freedom with how the presentation looks, I'll use Voicethread. If I have a lot of time, I might come back to Scrapblog.