When I was a teacher, I had my middle school students use Animoto to create a persuasive commercial for a charity of their choice. We raised money as a class, presented our commercials, and voted on which charity should receive the funds. It was a terrific project all the way around, largely thanks to Animoto. It’s a very user-friendly tool, and my students were largely able to create their projects independently.

Wideo has lots of templates and ways to customize your video, and the user-interface is very friendly and easy. I found Wideo a bit too busy for my purpose for this video, so I kept looking at the other tools.

Like Animoto, I was already familiar with Prezi. Prezi takes the core concept of PowerPoint and cranks it up a few notches. I like how visually intriguing it can be, but a downside is that it can be a bit dizzying.

I love the idea of Loom, that you can record both your screen and your face. I see limitless potential here, especially for online teaching where you want your students to see how to navigate a website or document, or how to accomplish a task, but you also want to add the personal touch of having your face connected to your voice.

Ultimately, Kapwing is exactly what I needed to create the video that I had in mind. I didn’t need anything flashy, as I needed the focus to be on how to accomplish the necessary steps and folds to create origami. I appreciate that Kapwing is free, but I had quite a few problems creating my video. Kapwing had a tendency to crash, especially whenever a text box was highlighted. Recording audio over the video was a bit tricky, and the text boxes kept reformatting themselves, but overall I was happy with the ease of use that Kapwing provided.

Of all the tools in this week’s sandbox, I am most excited about Loom. Regardless of your content area, you can use Loom meaningfully with your students. You can introduce an assignment or project, and go through the directions, rubric, and examples so that students fully understand expectations. You can help students navigate a website, as one of my classmates did for her library’s webpage. You can read aloud an ebook quite easily, and the students can see both the pages and your face. The possibilities are endless, and I’m looking forward to using this tool in my future teaching.