I teach a pre-service educator course at a local college.  Many of my students (future teachers) use animoto to create an "intro" video for their units, stringing together relevant images and sounds.  A future Italian teacher infused her essential questions for the unit into a multi-media presentation.  It was really neat - and she encouraged her students to create similar videos through each of her units during her student teaching.

I also LOVE animoto- especially the free educator's account which not onlygives teachers unlimited access, but also allows student access so they can create their own Animotos!!  I have used Animoto in several different ways and have found it to be very effective to engage students- specifically the visual learners.  Some ideas I have incorporated include:  introduce books, document field trips and class activities, introduce current events or a specific event in history, animate poems, review math concept (parallel lines, angles, etc.), document book lists by author, genre, etc.  The biggest plus for me is the ease at which you can quickly create a slide show.  I had 3rd graders this year creating animal Animotos according to habitats. The support from the folks at Animoto is also very good.  Just as an FYI- an easy way to add text to any Animoto is to create it on a PPT slide, save it as a JPEG and then upload it into your Animoto.

I use it all the time and have made more than 90 videos. I started using it to highlight NYC shelter dogs that are on the euthanasia list. I share the videos via Twitter and Facebook, trying to find people who want to adopt or foster the dogs. I posted some examples below. I also used it to introduce myself to my students this semester. I'm teaching a hybrid university course. I really like how you can select music for the videos, and the program has a easy tool for editing videos that you upload. I used SCREENR to make short tutorials on how to use Animoto. I now have people making videos who don't know how to add photos to Facebook and who don't know the basics of cutting/pasting URLS to share websites online. Here are some videos I've made....

http://animoto.com/play/U4A0lqyDdkwX9bFmI20sVQ

http://animoto.com/play/1IBq2lsWpne3bSPyNVwd6w

http://animoto.com/play/7rPh1kfQjvn1B6MJTfTz1w

And my intro to my students.... After watching it, they said they can envision creating videos like this with their own students....

http://animoto.com/play/LEq1Zp1S9VLFhOo0DMGeTw

Here's one of the tutorials I made using SCREENR...

http://screenr.com/NCL