Innovative Education in Vermont
Exploring innovative, personalized, student-centered school change
Students at Peoples Academy Middle Level in Morrisville, Vermont, are exploring the theme of identity in their humanities class. In part, they’re doing so by “speaking” for presidential candidates, using their research and argumentative writing skills with an app called Chatterpix Kids.
Continue reading “Exploring identity and current events with Chatterpix”
During a five minute reflection, if a student is given one minute to find a picture and mark the mouth, then he or she still has four minutes to try to come up with something interesting to reflect about. So this is four minutes more than they may have spent if they were asked to just write, or required to use a tool that they weren’t that interested in.
–Life Legeros
Alert reader Lucia Hoegeveen asked a question about our suggestion that you create a map of a country and give each state it’s own voice. Now, as she pointed out, each Chatterpix you create can have only one mouth. So in order to make our Chatter-map, we’re going to need to app-smash Chatterpix in one of a couple different ways.
Or maybe we’ll just put them all together in a blender and hope for the best. I’ll let you know after I finish this delicious coffee.
A great way to bring book covers to life with augmented reality is through the AR app Aurasma. But for some students who are shy about actually appearing in videos for book reviews or trailers can app-smash the Chatterpix app to give voice to their favorite characters from books.
It’s a great way for students to think about elements of storytelling such as point-of-view, summation, showing vs. telling
Besides, it’s just fun!
Chatterpix is a free iOS app that allows you to put tiny mouths on your photos and give them silly voices. I am not making any of this up. Here’s one of a crab explaining facts about crustaceans:
There are so many ways you could use this in an educational setting:
“Bios” could actually be recorded for just about anything that will hold still long enough: moss, trees, VW Vanagons, abacuses, graham crackers, more moss, just of a different kind. There’s something about the ability to give silly voices (along with glasses, top hats, scarves and electric guitars) to items and get into the storytelling groove that’s incredibly appealing.
In fact, I can pretty much guarantee that if I’d gotten to write dialogues for animated chemistry molecules, I’d’ve passed Chem on the first try:
As an educator, you could also record yourself giving instructions for a lesson; modeling that bio of a famous historical figure; create a map of a significant place in a book your class is reading and APP-SMASH: photos + Chatterpix + other photos + Thinglink = APP-SMASH! YES!
Or you could just record dogs talking about which strand they’re taking at this year’s Code Camp: