iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

digital storytelling

Imagistory – An App for Narrating Picture Books

by

Screen Shot 2014-09-29 at 10.09.11 AM Imagistory is a neat iPad app on which children can narrate picture books. The app provides children with a wordless picture books. Children are free to record themselves telling a story about the pictures in the books. Children can record and re-record stories as often as they like.

Imagistory is easy to use. To get started open the app and select one of the free picture books (additional picture books are available through in-app purchases). When you’re ready to record allow the app to access your iPad’s camera and microphone. The app asks for camera access so that you can take a picture to use as your author profile. As soon as you open the book the app is recording your voice. As you swipe through the pages the recording continues. At the end of the book you can save play the story back, save the story, or record a new version of your story.

Screen Shot 2014-09-29 at 10.13.57 AM

Imagistory could be a good app for young students to use to practice developing the plotline of a story.

Comics Head – A Nice iPad App for Creating Comic Strips

by

Screen Shot 2014-08-20 at 9.50.36 PM Comics Head is a nice app for creating comic strips on your iPad. The app makes it easy to create comics even if, like me, you don’t have any drawing skills. To create comics on Comics Head you simply choose a template then add a background, characters, and speech bubbles from the art galleries. You can mix and match the backgrounds and characters as much as you like until you arrive at the perfect combination for your story.

As I wrote in post a couple of weeks ago, having students create comic stories can be a good way to get students to share stories about themselves. Through creating comic stories you can have students share favorite stories from their summer vacations. In the process students learn how to use a new tool, practice developing storylines, and they let you in on a little bit of who they are as people.

30hands Introduces a Pro Version

by

30hands is a popular iPad app that makes it very easy to create a narrated slideshow. Recently, 30hands introduced 30hands Pro. The pro version allows for integration of Google Drive and Dropbox for storing and sharing projects. The pro version also offers the option to insert video clips into your slides. Final projects in 30hands Pro are available in high resolution.

A free version of 30hands is still available. 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.

Shadow Puppet Releases an Edu Version Students Can Use to Create Videos

by

Screen Shot 2014-06-27 at 7.08.29 AM Shadow Puppet is an iPad app for creating short audio slideshow videos. Yesterday, the same developers introduced Shadow Puppet Edu. 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 the images. Shadow Puppet Edu allows students to add text and stickers to each image too. When they’re happy with their work students can share their Shadow Puppet Edu projects through a variety of methods including YouTube and email. Shadow Puppet Edu projects are automatically saved to the camera roll on a student’s iPad.

Screen Shot 2014-06-27 at 7.30.00 AM

 

Shadow Puppet Edu is free. Students do not have to register for an account or have an email address to use Shadow Puppet Edu.

How to Combine Tellagami Clips in iMovie

by

tellagami Tellagami is a great app for creating short digital stories on an iPad or on an Android device. The shortcoming of the app is that you can only record one scene before you have to save the movie to your iPad. Today, I facilitated a workshop in which we created a bunch of Tellagami stories. Many people in the workshop wanted to combine their Tellagami clips to create a longer video. The easiest way to do that on an iPad is to use iMovie. In the video below I demonstrate how you can combine Tellagami video clips in iMovie.