Problem with the site.

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.

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.