Animoto.com

Thanks to Sandy, I have had some experience with this tool. My students loved it! I can't believe how easy it is to use. We downloaded Audacity and had the kids create their own narration to go with their Colonial Fair pictures.
I loved how the kids had to plan out their storyboard and collaborate for an appropriate narration. The main problem we faced was that we couldn't exactly control the length of the video, so their narration would get cut off at the end. Eventually we just dealt with it and were satisfied even if it faded out a little bit at the end.

Now that I know how easy the tool is to use, I would like to use it in a more beneficial way. We had the kids recount their experiences at the Colonial Fair, but that doesn't really show much of what they learned. Although it was a nice piece to share with parents since they were not invited to spend the day with us, I'd rather have them create a brief movie about the difficulties of the time period or the role of the family members.

We could use this for books as well - even create a montage of images (could get them from Flickr) about our novel with narration or music that connects to the plot. Wonder if that would work...