Community reviews for Mozilla Popcorn Maker

This is by no means for deluxe photoshopping or video-editing, but sometimes you want students to get their hands dirty and to get them having fun and creating quickly. For this, Popcorn Maker is perfect. Student jump in and start adding their captions, images and mixes to videos. It is rewarding to see immediate results of work and serves as a great stepping stone to more complex tools. Wondering through the menus of iMovie and other movie makers can be a drag. Here you have a very neat, minimal UI that rewards students with immediate results.

Like other Mozilla products these days the site is a bit tempermental.

When it comes to technology, Mozilla Popcorn Maker is a fun, easy tool to learn that puts the "wow" in a project. It allows students to show their creative side without using a complicated tool. Although it looks like it would take a long time to learn, Mozilla offers a great tour of the technology when you log in and also has a good help feature. When a project is completed it can be easily embedded into a course or shared with a link. Popcorn Maker not only has a fun name but it is also a fun tool to use in class that will allow teachers to show how technology can be fun to use while being creative.

Popcorn Maker is a great tool for project-based assessments. It offers tons of information sharing capabilities while simultaneously providing room for student creativity. I really appreciated the more advanced editing options that one would find in a serious editing program, like Camtasia. It is nice to know that there is a free program available students could use for video editing. That being said, I also appreciate how easy it is to incorporate media. A student with some computer awareness, but limited video editing experience would still be able to use Popcorn Maker easily. One criticism I have is that I wonder about copyright issues with YouTube and SoundCloud. When it is so easy to download media from the Internet, I wonder if students are considering fair use and proper acknowledgment of their sources.

I love the idea of Popcornmaker and it looks like they've added features, such as a collaboration mode. The fact that you can remix and build off of other videos is key. Mozilla Webmaker site offers many ideas for teachers to use this tool in the classroom. I do wish the user could have a more public channel such as YouTube.

Now, I would LOVE to use this with high schoolers. It's intuitive (to users of the inter webs) and fun and incorporates copyright protection as well. That said, my teachers were just so thrown off. "WHAT IS THIS THING?" The practice lesson taught me to teach the tech before I try to use it. Lesson learned.

It would be better if it has more advanced editing controls to make the output videos interactive ones (like it can pause at certain times and ask questions) to make it a better learning tool.