Tag Archives: Animoto

4 great apps for creating presentations on your iPad

It’s that magical, magical time of the year again!

No, not the end of the school year. (STOP THAT.)

I meant it’s the time of year when your students have a lot of opportunities to share out their year’s worth of learning. And here are 4 great apps for creating presentations on your iPad.

1. Touchcast

Touchcast lets students pull links, videos and even interactive polls directly into their videos, as well as letting them easily create scenes in front of a green screen. Imaginary assignment: Have your students file an on-the-spot “news report” from locations around the globe. Also underwater. And from the center of the earth. And in space.

Seriously, someone should do this. Then send us the link, and we’ll showcase your students’ work on this blog. Is that a deal or what?

8th grade scientists in Morrisville, VT, made this series of Touchcast presentations to illustrate distance over time. STEM-tastic!
8th grade scientists in Morrisville, VT, made this series of Touchcast presentations to illustrate distance over time. STEM-tastic!

2. Aurasma

Check it out: you can now make auras directly from the iPad, inside the Aurasma app. A great opportunity to app-smash: have the student video themselves with the iPad’s camera, edit it in holy of holies iMovie, then embed the resultant polished product into a real-world artifact, like their school portrait, or a painting, or a hand-illustrated map of the U.S. Get a whole class-worth’s together and create an Aurasma-powered scavenger hunt around school for parents and visitors. Aurasma’s channel feature means that you control who sees the work, too.

Boom! End-of-year project sorted! All before your second cup of coffee!

Below, this music teacher pinned sheet music up, then embedded videos of student performances in those sheets. Y’all, teachers are so. Clever.

 

3. Animoto

Personally, I find Animoto the easiest app of the bunch to use when, for instance, you have a bunch of photos you just want to assemble into a montage (“Mon-tage!”) with some cheezy inspiring music laid over the top. It really is just two steps: first, tap tap tap each photo you want to include in the montage (“Mon-tage!”), then pick your music. DONE.

Here’s one I made earlier!

 

4. HaikuDeck

Educator Mike Pall created this HaikuDeck to offer students tips on shooting great Instagram videos.
Educator Mike Pall created this HaikuDeck to offer students tips on shooting great Instagram videos.

HaikuDeck‘s both easy to use and creates a polished, SlideShare-worthy presentation that, without audio, depends heavily on narrative and visual storytelling to engage the audience. It calls on a different set of cognitive skills and really makes students focus on the message over presentation style.

 

So! Those are my 4 favorites, but this educator found a whopping 15! Which ones do you use?

Ever wonder what 300 educator selfies looks like?

As part of the endnote for Dynamic Landscapes 2014, we asked 300 Vermont educators to take and share selfies.

And they did.

A huge thank you to everyone who turned out for the conference and played along with our bingotastic endnote. I made this video collage with Animoto on the iPad, and then when iTunes refused to play nicely because of Configurator, I switched to Animoto on a laptop. Platform-smash! Party!

Anyway, you guys are amazing! See you next year!

Video creation and editing apps for the classroom

What tools you use are missing from this list?

DragonTape Explain Everything iMotion PhotoStory Reel Director Silent Film Studio Vine Touchcast iMovie HTML Map

I sat down this afternoon to brainstorm a list of video editing, creation and mashup apps that could be useful for educators. Above you’ll find the nine I came up with off the top of my head, all of which I’ve either used or seen used in the classroom. But I know I’m missing some.

Here are some sample lesson plans or how-to’s for each of the video apps above:

dragontape2

 

 

 

 

 

  • iMovie: Essex Middle School Edge students use it to make book trailers:

 

  • Touchcast: Peoples Academy Middle Level 8th graders made STEM-focused Touchcasts to illustrate distance over time:
"An alien named Athena lives on Mars, and goes to school. Athena's house is a spaceship. When she left to go to school, she realized she left something about half way...."
“An alien named Athena lives on Mars, and goes to school. Athena’s house is a spaceship. When she left to go to school, she realized she left something about half way….”

 

  • ReelDirector: How about a video story of one classroom’s activities?

 

 

 

And this educator handed over the iPad to her own kids, asked for a stop-motion video and was astonished by how many apps they wound up using to create their magnum opus, Invasion:

What video creation / editing / mashup / squish / bash / remix tools are you and your students using?