iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

digital storytelling

Adobe Slate – Yet Another Way to Create a Photo Story

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adobe_slate For the last week I’ve seen lots of people Tweeting and blogging about Abode’s new iPad app for visual storytelling. The free iPad app is called Adobe Slate. I finally gave it a try this morning.

Adobe Slate is designed to help you create a visual story from the pictures on your iPad, from the web, from an Adobe online account, or from a Dropbox account. You start your story by importing a cover picture and writing story title. You then add pictures one-by-one and write captions for each. You can also write headlines for each image. One convenient feature of Adobe Slate is that the integrated image search tool will import Creative Commons attributions with the images you select. Adobe Slate has a dozen or so filters or themes that you can apply to your story. Completed stories can be published online through a variety of channels including Adobe’s platform, Facebook, Twitter, or embedding into a blog post.

Adobe Slate is a nice tool, but it doesn’t stand out as being any better than Storehouse, Tackk, Haiku Deck or any number of similar options. All of those tools and Adobe Slate provide a nice way for students to share the highlights of a personal story or share the highlights of an online research activity.

Three iPad Apps for Creating Talking Pictures

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chatterpixA couple of weeks ago at the Future Schools Expo in Sydney I facilitated a workshop about making media with mobile apps. The idea of creating talking pictures was one of the ideas that was a hit with some of the participants in the workshop. In the workshop I shared examples of using ChatterPix Kids to have students create short audio stories about their favorite animals. I also shared an example of using Morfo to create audio biographies in which students give voice to famous people in history. Below is a short summary of both of those apps as well as another app useful for a similar purpose.

ChatterPix Kids is a free iPad app that you and your students can use to turn pictures into talking pictures. To create a talking picture just snap a picture with your iPad or import a picture from your iPad’s camera roll. After taking the picture just draw in a face and tap the record button to make your picture talk. Your recording can be up to thirty seconds in length. Before publishing your talking picture you can add fun stickers, text, and frames to your picture. Finished Chatter Pix projects are saved to your camera roll and from there you can export it to a number of services including YouTube. ChatterPix Kids doesn’t require students to create an account in order to use the service. Using the app could be a great way to get students to bring simple stories to life.

Morfo 3D Faces is an iPad app that you can use to create a talking picture of person’s face. You can take a picture of a person or you can take a picture of a picture of a person (for example, taking a picture of a picture of a person in a book). Once you’ve captured the picture you can customize the face by altering the eyes, mouth, and nose to move as you talk. After customizing the picture you can record yourself talking. Click here for an example of an elementary school teacher using this app with her students.

DMD Topic is a neat iPad app for quickly creating short videos. To create a video you simply take a picture or import a picture from your iPad’s camera roll then start talking about the picture. You can record for up to 30 seconds. When you’re finished recording, watch the video and select “tagging” to make the video automatically zoom to the objects that you are talking about in your video. DMD Topic could be a good app to have students use to create short explanatory videos. Students can also use the app to create a short video about picture of their pets, their families, or anything else that is important to them (perhaps the players on their favorite sports team). DMD Topic does not require registration.

Storehouse Is a Good App for Creating Personal Year-in-Review Stories

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storehouse 3 This is the time of year that many of us take a look back at the year. I did that this afternoon by creating a Storehouse story about my year. Storehouse is a free iPad app for telling stories through images, videos, and text. Each story has a vertical layout reminiscent of a wide screen blog post. 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. You can see my story here.

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As your students create their stories encourage them to think about the sequencing their media to support the narratives of their stories.

Try DMD Topic To Create Talking Pictures On Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-11-24 at 4.23.39 PM DMD Topic is a neat iPad app for quickly creating short videos. To create a video you simply take a picture or import a picture from your iPad’s camera roll then start talking about the picture. You can record for up to 30 seconds. When you’re finished recording, watch the video and select “tagging” to make the video automatically zoom to the objects that you are talking about in your video. Watch my sample video to see a DMD Topic video in action.

DMD Topic could be a good app to have students use to create short explanatory videos. Students can also use the app to create a short video about picture of their pets, their families, or anything else that is important to them (perhaps the players on their favorite sports team). DMD Topic does not require registration.

DMD Topic is free for a limited time (as of November 24, 2014). The regular price is $0.99 USD.

Three Free(ish) iPad Apps for Creating Narrated Stories

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Creating narrated slideshows is one of the easiest ways to introduce students to digital storytelling practices. Students can create narrated slideshows to illustrate and explain their research findings, to tell a personal story, or to outline the framework for a story that will written down later. The following three iPad apps all provide an easy way to create narrated slideshows.

shadow puppetShadow Puppet Edu is my favorite app on this list. Shadow Puppet Edu is a free iPad app that students can use to create audio slideshow videos. The app offers an integrated search tool that students can use to find pictures from the Library of Congress, to search for images from NASA, and to find Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr. Students can also import pictures from the camera roll on their iPads. After selecting a set of images students can arrange them into any sequence by simply dragging and dropping them into order. Then to create a story students press the record button and talk while flipping through their images. Students can share their Shadow Puppet Edu projects through a variety of avenues including YouTube and email. Shadow Puppet Edu projects are automatically saved to the camera roll on a student’s iPad.

Screen Shot 2014-11-20 at 9.57.30 PM30hands is a free iPad app that makes it very easy to create a narrated slideshow. To create a basic narrated slideshow on 30hands all you need to do is import images from your iPad’s camera roll then press the record button below each image to record your narration. If you don’t have any pictures on your iPad you can take pictures using the 30hands app. 30hands also allows you to draw images instead of importing pictures. You can combine imported pictures with drawn images in your presentations. And you can draw on top of imported images. When your project is complete you can save it on your iPad or share it with the 30hands community.

30hands is also available in a pro version. The pro version of 30hands allows for integration of Google Drive and Dropbox for storing and sharing projects. Additionally, the pro version offers the option to insert video clips into your slides.

pixntellPixntell is an iPad app for quickly creating simple narrated photostories. To create a story using Pixntell all that you need to do is start a new project, select some images, place them in order, and then start talking about each of your pictures. You control the timing for each image. If you want to talk about your first picture for twenty seconds, your second picture for just three seconds, and your third picture for fifteen seconds, you can do that. Pixntell allows you to crop your pictures, add text them, add filters to them, place fun stickers on your pictures, and draw on your images highlight a portion of them. When your project is complete you can upload it directly to YouTube, save it in your Dropbox account, share it on Facebook, or send to friends via email. The free version of Pixntell allows you include five images in your projects. The paid version allows you use an unlimited amount of images in your projects.