iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

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Create Talking Animations With These Free iPad Apps

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

Making animated movies is one of my favorite video creation projects for elementary school students. Students love hearing their voices bringing to life an animated character on the screen. You can have students create animations to tell stories from their own lives or to animate short stories that they have written in your classroom. The following three free iPad apps enable elementary school students to create talking animated movies.

PuppetMaster is a free iPad app that kids can use to create animated movies. The app is designed for elementary school students and therefore doesn’t require students to create accounts in order to use it. All movies made with the PuppetMaster app are saved to the camera roll on a student’s iPad. To create an animated movie with PuppetMaster students simply open the app, select a character, and the select a background scene for their movies. PuppetMaster has pre-made characters and background scenes. Students can also add their own background scenes by taking a picture to use as the background. For example, I made a movie with a robot character attempting to reach under the Christmas tree in my living room (you can view that movie here). Students can record themselves talking or singing in the background of their movies in order to tell their stories.

ChatterPix Kids is a free iPad app that 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 can be a great way to get students to bring simple stories to life. Check out the video below that was made, in part, by using ChatterPix.

Tellagami is a free iPad that elementary school students enjoy using to create narrated animations. Tellagami allows your students to create customized animated scenes in a matter of minutes. To create a narrated, animated scene students simply open Tellagami and tap “create.” After opening the create menu students will see a default character and background scene. The characters can be altered by selecting from a big menu of customization options. The background scenes can be changed by selecting from a menu or by inserting a picture from the iPad’s camera roll. To add their voices to their animations students simply tap “record” and start talking. Completed animations are stored on the camera rolls of your students’ iPads. Tellagami does not require students to create accounts or have an email address.

Teach Your Monster Read for iOS – Free Through the Weekend

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Teach Your Monster to Read is a great game environment in which students can develop the speed and accuracy with which they recognize letters, sounds, and words. For the rest of this week and through the weekend (March 21-26, 2017), the app is completely free.

The Teach Your Monster to Read environment contains eight levels (or islands as they’re called in the game) each containing four activities. Students play the game as a friendly monster avatar. On each island students can earn prizes for their monsters and customize the look of their monsters.

Winning Words Offers Fun Word Games for Kids

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Winning Words is the developer of seven free word games for students to play on their iPads. All of the games use the same style as the classic Memory card game. For example, in Antonym Match students have to flip over one card that has a word written on one side. Then they have to flip over another card to try to find the antonym to the first word they saw. If a match isn’t found the cards flip over and the player has to start again.

Antonym Match can be played by up to four people at a time. You can choose a level of difficulty and the number of cards displayed in each game.

There are six similar games offered by Winning Words. Those games are Synonym Match, Homophone Match, Compound Word Match, Singular and Plural Match, Verb Match, and Double Letter Match. All of the Winning Words games can be found here.

The Winnings Words games are free and do not require registration in order to play.

My Favorite Video Creation iPad Apps for Elementary School

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When it comes to creating videos in elementary school there are some qualities needed in an iPad app that aren’t needed in apps for older students. For example, it’s helpful to not require that students register to use the app. It’s also nice if the app has a child-friendly interface. The following three apps have those qualities and more.

Learn more about making video on tablets and phones at the Practical Ed Tech BYOD Camp.

ChatterPix Kids is a free iPad app that 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 can be a great way to get students to bring simple stories to life. Check out the video below that was made, in part, by using ChatterPix.

Tellagami is a free iPad that elementary school students enjoy using to create narrated animations. Tellagami allows your students to create customized animated scenes in a matter of minutes. To create a narrated, animated scene students simply open Tellagami and tap “create.” After opening the create menu students will see a default character and background scene. The characters can be altered by selecting from a big menu of customization options. The background scenes can be changed by selecting from a menu or by inserting a picture from the iPad’s camera roll. To add their voices to their animations students simply tap “record” and start talking. Completed animations are stored on the camera rolls of your students’ iPads. Tellagami does not require students to create accounts or have an email address.

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

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.