PE5_GoAnimate

Before I begin creating my scene, I thought I would share what you get if you choose to upgrade your account.  You can see the some of the added bonuses, and I'll tell you the prices so you can weigh the pros and cons for yourself. 
For a 3 month subscription, you will pay $18, for one year it will be $58, and for two years your total will be $108.  You do have the option to pay monthly, so the cost is more spread out and affordable.  However, if you are using this pretty consistently in your classroom, the price is probably worth it.

Okay, let's get to the creative bits. 
As you start to make scenes from scratch, this is what your screen will look like.  Notice that the characters to the left of the screen are fairly generic and limited.  This is fine for my purpose today, but you might want to spice things up for your learners.  You also have the option to add scenes to, like it says, make the story richer.

So, basically, this site is really simple and user-friendly.  Once you choose your characters, you drag and drop it into the scene, then you click on the character to add dialogue.  You can type up to 180 characters, similar to Twitter.  Once you make one character talk in one scene, you have to add another scene.  I kept adding scenes until I had about 12, then I hit preview.  I think I made a mistake because my animation only had one scene.  Maybe I needed to click on save, at the top of the page, before I clicked on preview.  When I went back to my animation, the page loaded extremely slowly, and my animation was gone!  Back to the drawing board.  Good thing this tool is extremely simple to create in.  This time I will make sure to save my work.  Another feature I discovered was the editing feature.  The interface of the editing feature is like a simplified version of iMovie.  To make a scene shorter or longer, you just drag the box to elongate it or...whatever the opposite of elongate it.  Compress?  Sure, we'll go with that.  So, for me, since my scenes only had one line of dialogue, I *compressed* my boxes so the duration of the scene was just a couple minutes long.  This editing feature is easy-peasy now that I underwent the iMovie three hour marathon training.

After a disappointing realization, I am scrapping my idea to create a video from scratch.  The realization I had was this:  Nothing is free, not even on the Internet.  The added scenes cost money.  That is why they did not save, and I only had one scene upon first trying to view my video.  And I thought I was being clever.  I guess this is all part of learning, but sometimes learning that what you want to do is not possible (without spending some dough) really stinks.

I shall digress for now, and crawl into a corner to lick my Web 2.0 inflicted wounds.  Damn you, Internet, damn you.