Reading stories, watching videos, and listening to podcasts is one way to learn with an iPad. But a more fun way to learn with an iPad is to create things. Here are five iPad apps that elementary school students can use to create stories.
Doodlecast for Kids is an iPad app that allows students to create short whiteboard videos. Students can create short videos by drawing on a blank whiteboard. Students can record their voices as they draw on the whiteboard. Students who are struggling to start their stories can use one of the twenty-three story prompts offered by Doodlecast for Kids. A student’s video can be up to three minutes long. Videos can be saved to a student’s iPad’s camera roll and or uploaded to YouTube.
The Collins Big Cat iPad apps are part short story and part story creation tool. Each of these free apps, produced by Harper Collins, contains a short story that students can read to themselves or have narrated to them. The stories contain interactive elements that students can move around on each page of the stories. After reading and or listening to the story in the app students can create their own stories using settings and characters that match the theme of the story they just read. On each page students can select a background, drag design features into the background, drag characters into the story, add text, and record their own narrations for their stories.
Story Wheel is an app for the iPad and iPhone that is designed to promote audio storytelling. Spin the Story Wheel on your device and when it lands on an image, dictate a short story based on that image. When you are finished recording, you can play your story back with animations generated by Story Wheel. You can try the basic Story Wheel app for free. To get the most out of the app you will probably want to get the full version of the app for $2.99.
Little Story Maker is a great little app that adults and children can use to create their own custom books on their iPads. The app provides book templates that you complete with your own images, text, and voice narration. All of the books that you create are stored in your Little Story Maker bookshelf. To create a book in Little Story Maker start by adding a title, add a cover image by selecting from your iPad’s camera roll, then choose a template for your book. On each page you can add an image from your camera roll and type the text for your page. If you want to add narration to your book simply click the “record audio” button after typing your text. Then you can add narration that will play on the page.
Book Creator ($4.99) allows anyone to create their own books using images, text, videos, and audio recordings. You can arrange your book in three different formats; portrait, square, or landscape. Each page in your book can include pictures and videos from your iPad’s camera roll and or from your iTunes library. In addition to the pictures and videos you can include as much as text as you can fit on each page. In fact, if you just want to have text on a page you can do that. If you would like to narrate your book you can tap the record button to add your voice to each page of your book. Every page in your book can have a custom color scheme.
