I stumble into the office this morning with a few tasks that need attended to, and then an opportunity to check out a new app comes across a feed. I am not the best at ignoring these opportunities, so I dive in and explore a bit.
The app is Adobe Post. Released yesterday and currently available only as an iPhone app.
Adobe Post is a free, easy to use app, which allows you to add text to a photo enhancing the message you are communicating.
Imagine a student typing in a vocabulary word with a definition. Or possibly they've typed in a sentence using the word. In either case the text overlays a photo in a eye catching artistic manner.
As a teacher quickly share a photo on instagram of your students success stories.
Users can take photos, use pictures from their photo roll, or search online from free photos available to them via the app.
Remix a stunning graphic available from Adobe Post and turn it into yours very quickly.
When you like the finished product, the options include saving it to the camera roll, email, or any social media posting.
Creativity at your fingertips, just in time to capture your Holiday moments.
What I like about the iPad is the ability to work without connecting to the Internet. This is especially true when you work with field study groups up in the wilderness.
At Outdoor School, 5th or 6th grade students spend 2-4 days experiencing the outdoors. They get to sleep, eat, and learn up in the wilderness. Part of their experience is rotating through hour long field study groups which could include learning about weather, creating survival shelters, or identifying plants.
In this hour long field study we start with a review of the food chain including producers, consumers, and decomposers.
The students then take an iPad on a scavenger hunt snapping photos of producers, consumers, and decomposers. Since consumers don't stand and wait for a photo, we instruct them to take photos of evidence a consumer was here, like a nest or track.
After all the photos are taken, the students storyboard their movie choosing which photos to use and how to tell about the food chain they found. We ask they include a scenery photo as the title slide and a selfie photo as their credits.
The finished product is created with Adobe Voice, usually 5-10 photos, a narration that tells the story, and background music provided by the app.
At the end of the hour we save the videos to the camera roll and repeat the study for the next set of students. Then back in town we upload the videos to Youtube. Here is an example from a group of 6th graders in North East Oregon and their food chain video.
NOTE: If you use Adobe Voice, be sure to login to the app while in wifi, then turn the iPad to Airplane mode. As a backup iPad app we will use 30Hands in case Adobe Voice logs out.
There are many great ePortfolio options available, including Evernote or Google, however they can be a bit overwhelming for the students in primary grades. Especially if you want to have them save exemplars.
Seesaw is a free iDevice app that is very simple to use allowing any student capable of using an iPad to take a photo to save an exemplar into their ePortfolio.
Instead of calling them ePortfolio's, Seesaw uses the term journals, both class journals containing works displayed by the entire class and individual journals containing works by any particular student.
The process is quite simple. As a teacher you create your free account which will be tied to your classroom. Set up all your students inside that class.
From there you can add either a photo, video, drawing, or something from the camera roll.
Once you upload an item, like a photo, you can add annotation, voice recording, or text.
Then you select which student is associated with the artifact. You can select multiple students if it is a group project.
The app allows for student access as well. The only rights students have will be to add artifacts. Students do not need an account, just scan a QR code and they are in. While logged in as a student they will have the ability to view any artifact from within the class, not just their own.
Let the students do the work: take the picture, create a drawing, shoot a video, or select a project from the camera roll to insert into their own journal. As a safe guard, before it is finalized into a students journal the teacher must approve the artifact from within their teacher account.
Seesaw allows for you to invite parents so they have ability to see only their child's artifacts.
If you have been looking for an ePortfolio type tool to use with K-3rd grade, this is a perfect fit. Easy to use so students do the work, teacher has full control over anything posted, and parents have access to their child's work. Also a great visual recap come conference time.
Word Clouds is a newly released word cloud creator app for both the iPad and the iPhone. Very simple to use and currently free, this app would be a great addition to your iPads.
Type or copy and paste text into the app and create. Use the tools along the top to change features such as font, word count, randomize, layout, and color.
There are no ads or watermarks both in the app or on the finish project, which is a saved photo to your camera roll.
Do you have a need to insert text onto a photo? Two great apps are available called Phonto and TypoPic. Phonto has always been free, and currently TypoPic is free, but regularly will cost a couple bucks. Both apps are iPad and iPhone compatible.
With both apps you can use a picture from your camera roll, or take one, and insert text on your picture. Some of the text formatting options include font choices, color, size, and style.
Using Phonto you can add mulitple text blocks so each one has a different format type. Also, since Phonto is free, there will be an ad running across the top, however exported photos are ad-free.
Screen Shot from Phonto
Using TypoPic you can add a variety of labels to your text, text shadow, and rotate the text in both 2-D and 3-D for additional effects.
Screen Shot from TypoPic
In both apps you can export the photo to your camera roll, as well as post to social media.
As a classroom teacher maybe you want students to label photos for identification purposes, such as a map or parts of a plant. Have students create a poem written on a photo, or a vocabulary description. Students could also label photos identifying mathematical relationships.
Apps that allow children to get up, move, and interact with their environment are great for the classroom. With Alien Assignment (Free) children are sent around on a scavenger hunt to find items to help the alien family repair their spaceship.
App plays like a movie which then asks the students to find something that they ask for. For example, the spaceship lost it's memory so they asked for a picture of something with words on it.
The app opens the camera inside the app for students to take the picture, then moves on to the next need. This continues for 4 items. Once the students have collected the four items they ask a grown up to review what they found.
Teachers or Parents can then look through what the students chose to take photos of and verify if they found the right item. If they did not, it will have the students go back and continue looking until all four pieces have been found and fixed on the spaceship.
This free app allows students to interact with the storyline, find characteristics, problem solve, and practice their listening skills. All instructions are given given aloud by one of the little alien characters. Once one scavenger hunt is complete, it begins a new hunt with different characteristics. I played the app three times by myself and with my own first grader and we didn't have repeat characteristics., though eventually they would probably repeat. This app would make a great center activity in the classroom or walk the room activity near the beginning of the year.
The Fred Rogers Center has other apps geared towards younger students as well. Many are great for at home or in daycare settings.
With so many story telling apps, it's nice to have a variety available for your classrooms.
Shadow Puppets is a new free story telling app released summer of 2013. A very easy to use app that allows you tell a story while scrolling through photos.
A couple of nice features with this app are you can pan photos, zoom in on photos, and point to a location on a photo all while recording your voice.
Stories are saved locally on the iPad in the app, and can also be saved to the camera roll. If you sign up for an account, you can share stories online.
By sharing stories via email, you receive a link to view the story, and the available embed code for the video.
With so many lessons that can incorporate students sharing their understanding of a concept by sharing their thoughts through photos, this is another choice you can have available in your box of story telling apps.
We took the tech to the wild....
Ipods and iPads are not just for classroom activities. We recently spent time at Outdoor School (ODS) for a few of our school districts and found that with the right apps and fully charged batteries a field study session about the food chain can become a fun collaborative project.
In the past we have done field study sessions with geocaching, photography and geolocations, panoramas, and mapping skills but as field study leaders we wanted to change it up a bit. One of the best things about being in the "wild", we have nature to draw from, covering consumers, producers, and decomposers for our region of Oregon. In the past, students had done paper/pencil scavenger hunts looking for the evidence of parts of the food chain. We wanted to modify this project and require that the students process this information collaboratively in more than one way. Our task for the students was to create a short food chain video which was to include a consumer, producer, decomposer, title, and credit photo.
Here's how it went. After a brief group discussion (less than 10 minutes) on a review of the food chain, we set off in groups of 2 or 3 students with one iPod Touch to take photos of evidence of each of the three parts of the food chain. In 15 minutes we returned with photos of consumers, producers, and decomposers that can be found at camp, as well as a nice scenery shot for our title slide and a group shot for the credit slide.
Once we returned to the lodge we had about 25 minutes left. Groups worked together to label their photos with Phonto and pull them in to 30 Hands to create and narrate their movie. These were both brand new apps for the students. In less than an hour, we had finished products, simple 10 to 20 second videos about the food chain at camp. These were fun to upload and share with their teachers once we returned to the office. I heard one classroom held a viewing party!
We are always looking for new tools to give more ways for students to create with their mobile devices. Recently I started playing with a quick 5 second video iPhone app called Vine.
Tap the screen to record until the bar at the top is full!
Geared towards social networking and creating short videos to share on twitter, facebook, etc... the ease of the app and the fact that thevideo can be sent to your photo album on the mobile device and not sharedmakes this an app that could be used for some great classroom projects!
Turn OFF the "Share on Vine"
With Vine, you record only when you have your finger on your screen. The longer you hold your finger down, the longer you record. It will stop you when you have reached the max length. By tapping in intervals, it is easy to create the stop motion effect to the video. Since it does save as a MOV file in your album, pull it into another video editing app or site to add music, titles, or adjust as needed!
Another app for stop motion video recording is OSnap. OSnap alows you to use a series of photos from your iPad to create a stop motion video or time lapse video. There are some great features in this app such as setting the camera on a timer, or snapping picture by making a loud noise. The paid version of this app ($2.99) will allow students to pull photos from their photo album, which for time lapse projects in science would be handy.
Over the past few weeks there have been updates to many of the apps we work with often. Here's a recap of a few of the apps that have added some great features or new interfaces which make them more user friendly.
Notice the added Spreadsheet option!
Google Drive recently added the ability to do spreadsheets within the app. I know there were many that felt that just editing documents was limiting. With the add of spreadsheets, it gives me hope of seeing Google Presentations and other features added in the future!
Basic Interface and Editing Features
Also a feature that is often overlooked with Google Drive is the ability to upload video or pictures from the photo album on the iPad or take a photo or video inside the Google Drive app. This feature can make it easier to move video files that are too large to email, yet you do not want to use a secondary site like YouTube. Once the photos or video are in google drive you can share them as you can any document on your Google Drive.
Take Photos or Videos Inside the App
New Blogger Interface
Ability to Adjust the Image Resolution
Blogger also recently released a whole new updated interface on the iPad. Many teachers use Blogger (blogspot) for classroom blogs. The updated app makes it easy to quickly upload photos with a brief dialogue to post, keeping your blog easily updated in a short amount of time. Other added features include changing photo resolution sizes.
My last "update" on "updates" is Bump. Bump is a free app that we've looked at for ways of sharing pictures between devices or "bumping" photos to a computer. Their last update has added the ability to bump audio, video, or documents as well. It's an easy way to share items without emailing. Students do need to create an account in order to bump.
One of the great advantages of using iPads or iPods is the opportunities to be creative, especially using the camera tool. I had an opportunity to peak into a classroom on a learning walk and that is exactly how the students were using iPads and iPods.
The students had a list of vocabulary words. For each word they had to write a definition using their own terminology. Once all the words were defined, they could insert a picture next to each definition demonstrating their visual understanding.
For example use the word "elate". Once the word is defined by a student, like "being happy", then they take a picture of their friends pretend cheering in all smiles.
Scribble Press and BookCreator are two of many apps students could use to create story books for their vocabulary words, and save their finished product into iBooks. This will allow students to keep a journal of all their words to review at a later time, or read through other students books if sharing iPads or iPods.
In one classroom students were using PicCollage and creating a VocabCollage, while in another room students used LifeLike Cards to create a vocab postcard.
Those students that finished their assigned tasks before others, could extend their learning by including pictures of antonyms for each term.
There are many apps to choose from, and the iDevice allows students to use the one app that stands out for creativity - camera tool.
Before I start about the app, this is not a post about how to use an app in the classroom. This is more of a "heads up" post, especially for those of us teaching upper elementary to college aged students.
The basic premise of Snapchat is to be able to quickly snap a photo and send it to another user and the photo will "self destruct" in a matter of seconds.
Quick, easy, share a funny moment with good friends..... but it creates a false sense of security in thinking that it will be gone within so many seconds of the receiver opening the picture. But it's not gone. One simple screen capture and that photo is now in the hands of someone else and can be sent anywhere.
To get the full idea, this app came to our attention when the Today Show ran a segment last week. You can watch the segment here.
This app reminds me of the importance of digital safety talks with our teens.
Common Sense Media has great Educator Resources for Digital Citizenship content aligned with the Common Core.
While walking through a school in our region, I walked right past a couple of students working on a project. The task was for them to create a video using Educreations explaining a certain math concept. What intrigued me was they were in the hallway using a very creative low cost podcasting center.
The teacher used an old large carboard box, lined it with styrophome, collapsable for easy transport, and quick to assemble.
It's a great way to provide a location for students to record without distracting others or having distractions interfere with their work.
Do you provide a location for students to use as a recording studio?
Pinnacle Studio by Corel Inc. is an iPad app that rivals the power of iMovie. Create clips, add images, titles, transitions, clip video, voice record, etc.... if you have an iPad 2 or even better the high resolution 3 - this is a must download!
It's always nice to come across a great app that can be used with creation activities. Frame Artist with Templates Pro is one of those apps. You can create newsletters, calendars, cards, magazine pages, and much more. There are many choices within the app to embed your own characteristics on your created documents.
You begin by creating a template from a grid, say 5x5 set of blocks. Next, merge blocks together to form your template and region. Like shown in the image blow where I've merged two sections of cells into larger blocks. Inside each cell you can insert pictures, text, or stickers. Yes, text may also go on pictures, rotated, re-sized, and more. After the insertion you can format text with fonts and colors, format the cells, and format the background. When finished share with many of the online communities, or simply save it to your photo gallery.
The app does come in a lite and Pro version. For a limited time only, the Pro version is free. Have students create trading cards of themselves, recipe cards for Mothers Day, magazine pages for a research topic, or a calendar page containing photos demonstrating a progression of a science project.
OK, so you are like everyone else when taking photos with a camera in that you have a hard time keeping the camera still. Or, you want to use the iPhone and take a picture of yourself, but your arms are too short. Here is a helpful tip.
Set the camera down and plug in your ear buds. Yes, those earbuds have a button that when clicked will take a photo with the camera on your iPhone or iPad. If you are on video mode, clicking the button will turn on and off the record action.
Note: you do need the earbuds with the built in microphone.
