Animoto

Animoto is a web application that produces video like trailors from photos, videos and music. What a fun way to do a Book Report! Students can spend one or two periods "harvesting" pictures that relate to their book. For Charlotte's Web, I made a folder in my "Pictures" folder entitled the same name as the book. Then I went to Google Images and typed in Charlotte's Web. I made sure to right click on the pictures and click on "Save Picture As". I find "copy" works 50% of the time, but fails 98% of the time :)
Animoto can be fanickity. (Is that a real word, or one that just my mom uses) It appears to only like JPEGs. So when you are looking for good pictures, double check that they are not copy righted and jpg!

When teaching Animoto, I usually give a quick reminder about using "legal" images.

For Charlotte' Web I downloaded images of: author, setting, main characters, problem, solution (without giving the story away) and a rating out of 5 stars.

Tumblebooks

Tumblebooks.com is a reading website where thousands of books can be found. These are books that can be found in libraries and bookstores (not just made up for the website), and you can choose to read them directly on the website, or have them read out loud to you. There is some animation on some of the books, but it is all using the existing illustrations from the book. Students can flip through a virtual copy of the book while it is being read out loud to them.
Tumblebooks is not a free site, however they do offer free trials to allow users to see the features available. With a school license, schools are given unlimited access to the Tumblebooks Library from school or home. This means that teachers can use it at school as a reading tool, and then students can go home, login with the school`s username and password, and have access to the same books and resources that they had at school. This is a huge value-added feature as it allows parents to use the features of the website, without having to purchase their own site license.
Some other features of the website are a search tool (to look for that particular book you want to hear), a favourites tab, puzzles and games that are related to specific books that you have been reading, read-a-long books, non-fiction books, and books specifically set up to work on the iPad. In addition, there are some books in other languages, however this is currently somewhat limited.
The collection of books and activities in the Tumblebooks Library is constantly growing, allowing students to read more and more books that they have not read before. This website comes highly recommended from Literacy Support Teachers as well as K-3 classroom teachers. Headphones are a must for use of Tumblebooks!