TinyTap is a great iPad app for developing your own educational games. I’ve been a big supporter of the app since it launched a couple of years ago. This week TinyTap introduced a new feature called Insights through which you can track your students’ use of your games. TinyTap Insights enables you create student groups, distribute activities to your students, and review your students’ progress on the activities that you assign to them. TinyTap Insights is a paid service, but you can get it for free this summer by referring others to the service.
More About TinyTap:
Through the app (also available for Android) you can build games by uploading pictures or taking new pictures that you arrange into sets. Then select each image to create questions about it. To create your question press the record button and start talking. When you have finished talking select a portion of your picture to serve as the answer. I created a small game about objects in my house. I took four pictures of things in my house. Each question asked players to identify the objects in my house. For example, when a player sees a picture of my kitchen he or she has to identify the tea pot by touching it.
TinyTap has options for creating Sound Boards and Shape Puzzles to go along with simple identification activities. A Sound Board is an image or set of images to which you add your voice. To create a Sound Board you highlight elements of a picture then record yourself talking about those elements. When a student views your Sound Board he or she can tap on highlighted portions of the image to hear you talking about them. This could be a great option for creating a narration of a flowchart or a diagram.
Shape Puzzles on Tiny Tap are games in which students have to drag pieces of an image into place in order to make the image whole. A great example of this is found in a Shape Puzzle about third grade sight words. Students hear the teacher say a sentence then they have to drag the words on the screen into place to make a sentence.
