iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

digital storytelling

Draw and Tell – Create Animated Stories

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Draw and Tell is a free iPad app that elementary school students can use to create simple animated stories. At its most basic level Draw and Tell provides blank canvases on which students can draw pictures and or write notes. The app provides students with a variety of canvases including a blank screen, lined screens, graph paper, and colorful background borders. Students can draw on these canvases by using virtual pencils, pens, crayons, and paints. Students can also apply digital stickers and stencils to their creations in Draw and Tell. If making drawings is all your students need to do, then they can save their drawings in the app and on their iPads’ camera rolls.

Draw and Tell is more than just a drawing tool. The app includes options for students to record themselves talking about the things they are drawing. Those recordings are saved with their drawings as simple video files. All of the files are saved in the app. Students can combine their video files to make longer animations. Or, as Tom Daccord pointed out in this post, students can use the video files in other apps like iMovie.

Inspire Creative Writing With the Scribeasy App

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scribeasy icon One of the challenges of teaching creative writing can be just getting students to start a story. That’s when apps like Scribeasy can be quite helpful as they provide students with visual prompts that can inspire the start of a story.

Scribeasy is a free iPad app that offers a fun environment in which students can write short stories. Students create stories on Scribeasy by first selecting a background image then dragging and dropping additional pictures onto their chosen background images. When students select objects to add to their backgrounds, a narrator reads the name of the object aloud. Students can move and resize all images to create a visual story in Scribeasy.

scribeasy writing

Once the visuals are in place on Scribeasy students then write a story about the scenes they’ve created. The next step is where Scribeasy shines. Scribeasy gives students a list of suggested words to use in their stories. The writing process is a timed activity. Students can choose to write for a short, medium, or large amount of time (they can extend the time if needed). Completed stories are saved in the app. Students can also save their stories to the camera roll on their iPads.

Part of this post originally appeared on my other blog, FreeTech4Teachers.com

Create Comics in the Latest Version of Book Creator for iPad

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book_creator The popular Book Creator iPad app received a great update this week. The full version of Book Creator now includes tools for creating comics. The comic creation tools include a large selection of layouts, speech bubbles, drawing tools, stamps, and stickers. You can even include your own pictures in the comics that you create in Book creator. Watch the video embedded below to learn more about the comics creation option in Book Creator.

Book Creator allows you to export your books to ePub format. The exported file can be opened and read in the Chrome web browser using the free Readium browser extension. This is a great option as it allows a parent who doesn’t have an iPad at home to view his or her child’s work at home.

Storehouse Adds New Features for Creating Visual Stories

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storehouse Storehouse is a free iPad and iPhone app that I’ve been recommending for over a year now. The app allows users to quickly create beautiful visual stories. This week Storehouse was updated. The updated version of the app provides features that many people have wanted. The updated version of the app now makes all of your stories private by default. Additionally, you can now embed your stories into blog posts rather than just sharing them via social media, email, or SMS.

The basic idea behind Storehouse is to create stories by combining images, text, and video clips on a blank canvas. To create your stories you can import pictures and video from your iPad’s camera roll, from Instgram, from Dropbox, and from Flickr. You can arrange the sequence of the media by dragging and dropping it into place. You can add text above and below each picture or video clip in your story. Completed Storehouse stories can be shared via email, Facebook, and Twitter. Stories published through Storehouse are given their own URLs for online viewing.

storehouse story

Storehouse is a nice app for students to use to develop visual stories about themselves, about field trips, or about school events like winter carnival day or other celebrations. As your students create their stories encourage them to think about the sequencing their media to support the narratives of their stories.

Little Story Creator – A Free App for Creating Multimedia Stories

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Screen Shot 2015-05-27 at 3.33.36 PM Little Story Creator (not to be confused with the similar sounding Little Story Maker) is a free iPad app that students can use to create multimedia stories on their iPads. The app was designed with students in mind and is therefore rather easy to use. On the app students can create multiple page stories. On each page of their stories students can add images and videos, type text, draw, and apply digital stickers. Students can also record audio on each page to narrate their stories.

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The stories that students create on Little Story Creator are automatically saved on their iPads. Students do not have to register on the app in order to use it or save their work. To share work students must have a parent or teacher log-in and share the story.