Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from April, 2015

ChatterPix Kids! What are you waiting for?

ChatterPix Kids  is a free iPad app that students can use to turn pictures into talking pictures. To create a talking picture just snap a picture with your iPad or import a picture from your iPad’s camera roll. After taking the picture just draw in a face and tap the record button to make your picture talk. Your recording can be up to thirty seconds in length. Before publishing your talking picture you can add fun stickers, text, and frames to your picture. Finished Chatter Pix projects are saved to your camera roll and from there you can export it to a number of services including YouTube.  ChatterPix Kids  doesn’t require students to create an account in order to use the service. Using the app could be a great way to get students to bring simple stories to life. This can be used for many different things in the classroom. 1. Use it at the start of the year as an introduction 2. Social Studies Students can save an image of a historical figure, draw an picture, with Doo

Writing in the 'Shed": Hook Your Students into Writing Using High-Quality Short Animated Videos

I recently attended the CUE 2015 conference with some Manhattan Beach Unified colleagues. One of our colleagues, Paula Noda, learned some cool writing strategies in her first presentation. In this writing activity, students watch high-quality animated videos and then write dialog and narration in small groups to accompany the video. Students record their dialog on the video to publish. Lisa Nowakowsi's presentation details her process and shows videos and student examples to support several lessons. Her examples are with 5th grade students, but this process could be used for any grade to record dialog for any video or book. Find out more about Lisa on her  website . Rob Smith has an amazing  website  full of videos organized by theme. Check them out; he even has lesson ideas for many of the videos! Here is one titled  Oktapodi  also available on YouTube.