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**Joining Animoto!**
Animoto is easy to use, and it is easy to join too. All you really need is an e-mail. At [|www.animoto.com] you can sign up for a free account; however, you are limited to only 30 second videos. This is a great place for you to begin playing and see just how easy it is to use! So find your inner child and go explore. The guys at Animoto know you are new to the game, and they've made it easy for you! The first thing Tracy did when she got on was to upload her wedding pictures and turn them into a video. So easy, and it made her feel like the movie star she'd always wanted to be!

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The beauty of being a teacher, though, is that Animoto offers preferred access to educators. If you sign up for an educator account at [], you will receive full access and be able to create full length videos for free! The guys at Animoto don't advertise this option on their front page though. So unless you search "animoto and education," you won't find the link to do this easily. We feel that in order to fully appreciate and experience the possibilities, you need to try Animoto with full access. It's still easy to sign up, and you still only need an e-mail address. Animoto gives teachers the best of both worlds - full access and free! One caution is that Animoto creates class accounts on a first come, first served basis. Do not expect to register for your class account before school and use it that same day. It can take up to a few days to receive your account information.======

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Once you receive your teacher code, your students can sign in to Animoto and create their account using their own e-mail. The sign up form will ask for a promo code, and that is where they will type in the educator's code you received when you registered. This will give your students full access to Animoto. Animoto will provide you a timeline within which you must register your accounts. After this date, your code will expire, and you will need to apply for a new one.====== For safety reasons, you may prefer to have students register with "dummy" e-mail accounts. Yes, that's the techy term! This will take some time depending on how many you have to create, but it is very handy. We used Gmail because we know that it is one of the e-mail providers that allows you to do this easily. Also, this method of registering is recommended by Animoto if you have younger students. Students under 13 are not able to register for their own accounts, but they can use Animoto if they have a "dummy" e-mail and use your classroom code when you register. The added bonus, everything they do goes through your main e-mail account. Not sure what the heck we're talking about? We weren't either when we first heard about it either. In fact, until we had actually done it, we weren't totally sure we got it!

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It works like this: We chose to create a special gmail account for school projects. For our purposes here, let's say it was awesometl@gmail.com. We then created awesometl+1@gmail.com; awesometl+2@gmail.com and so on all the way to awesometl+30@gmail.com. Once Animoto videos are complete, a finished copy of the video shows up on your screen and another is automatically delivered to your email. But any e-mail sent to one of the "dummy" accounts actually goes to the main e-mail address (yours). It offers just a little more control which may be especially important with younger students. We love this feature.======