iPad Apps for School

The Best iOS Apps for Students and Teachers

video creation

Animation Desk Premium – Free for a Limited Time

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animation The premium version of one of my favorite video creation apps, Animation Desk, is free today (At least in the U.S. I have not verified availability outside of the United States). Animation Desk is an iPad app for creating short, animated videos. The app allows you to create drawings using just your finger on your iPad’s screen. In each scene you can include as little or as much as you want to draw on the canvas. There are a few different brush and pencil effects that you can use in your drawings. The opacity of the colors you choose can be altered too. When you have completed drawing all of your scenes hit the play button to watch your animation unfold. If you’re happy with your animation you can export it to YouTube or save it to your iPad’s camera roll. Watch the video below for a demonstration of the app.

Animation Desk Lite | screencast tutorial from School Library Journal on Vimeo.

By the way, I discovered that Animation Desk was free today through Apps Gone Free. Every day Apps Gone Free lists paid apps that are available for free for a limited time.

Videoshop – Add Slow Motion and Image Effects to Your Videos

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Screen Shot 2014-04-09 at 8.14.25 PM Videoshop is an iPad for creating and editing videos. Through the app you combine video clips and images into one video project. You can import video clips and images from your iPad’s camera roll into your project or you can capture new footage through the app. After adding your video clips and images to your project you can edit each of the clips by trimming their lengths and adding slow-motion effects. To the pictures and video clips in your projects you can add voice-overs, background music, and text. Transition effects can be inserted between each clip and picture. The last step before publishing your video is to choose Instagram-like visual effects to your project.

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Videoshop’s biggest selling points are found in the visual effects and the sound library. The sound library contains dozens of sound effects that you can import into your project for free. You can also import music stored on your iPad.

LEGO Movie Maker – Make More Than Just LEGO Movies

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Screen Shot 2014-03-31 at 9.24.20 AM LEGO Movie Maker is a free iPad app for creating stop-motion movies featuring LEGO models. You have to provide your own LEGOs in order to create a LEGO movie. To create your movie with LEGO Movie Maker you build your LEGO scenes then use the free iPad app to take pictures of each scene. After taking your pictures you can apply Instagram-like effects to them. When you’re happy with the pictures you can adjust the speed at which they are played back in your movie. LEGO Movie Maker includes a gallery of free music to play with your pictures. You can also upload your own music or spoken audio track. Completed movies can be saved to your iPad or exported directly to YouTube.

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LEGO Movie Maker can be used for creating stop-motion movies about any topic. I used the app to make a simple stop-motion movie about one of my dogs. The app doesn’t require you enter an email address which makes it a good option for middle school and elementary school use.

Create Full Feature Stop-Motion Videos On Your iPad

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Screen Shot 2014-03-20 at 10.27.12 PM The National Film Board of Canada recently released a fantastic new iPad app for creating stop-motion videos. NFB StopMo Studio allows you to take a series of pictures and stitch them together to create a stop-motion video. Like similar apps you can adjust the number of images that are displayed per second.

Where the app really shines is in the post-image editing options. NFB StopMo Studio allows you to use multiple soundtracks in your video. You can also draw or type on top of each image in your video.

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NFB StopMo Studio could be a great app for students to use to create short claymation-style videos to animate a story that they have written in your classroom.

Create Whiteboard Recordings on the Updated eduClipper iPad App

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Screen Shot 2014-03-13 at 9.21.48 PM Cross-posted from my other blog, Free Technology for Teachers.

The popular digital portfolio and bookmarking service eduClipper has released an updated iPad appthat offers four awesome new features. The most notable of these features is whiteboard recording. This new feature allows you to create explanatory videos in a Khan Academy style or to narrate and annotate an item from your eduClipper library. Complementing the whiteboard recording feature is a new option to download your eduClips to your iPad or to Airdrop them to a computer.

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The other new eduClipper iPad app features are updated annotation tools and a new notification center. The annotation tools now include options for changing the thickness of your lines, new line and font colors, and new font style choices. The new notification center resembles that of Google+ in that you’re able to go back and view all notifications on each of your eduClips.

Disclosure: I am an advisor to eduClipper with a very small equity stake in the company.