 Working in instructional technology, I can't tell you how many times I hear the question, what apps are best for my classroom? Well, that's a very hard question to answer, but one of the easiest responses for me to give others is to choose an iPad app that allows your students to show what they know. In other words, how can they create something on the iPad that helps them teach someone else what they've learned? We know from our experience as educators to truly learn something, we should always show someone else. And Benjamin Franklin's famous quote of, tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn, verifies this even more deeply. So today on this Wednesday webinar from ESU8, I, Katie Maro, am going to show you some of my favorite apps for creation and sharing what we've learned on the iPad in the form of some kind of a presentation or a simple illustration that can help our teachers assess what we've learned and the rest of the world learn from us. Now to get started, there's a great video on the link that I'll share in the show notes that shows how kindergarten students, first grade students, very young learners get excited and learn more deeply when they create. I just encourage you to take a minute to watch that when you have a chance. The iPad apps that are designed for students to do just what we're talking about today, show what they know, are so numerous that we could go on for hours and hours explaining them. I'm just going to highlight some of my favorites and these are just, again, my personal favorites. I want you to know that many of them may have that more elementary look and feel, but that does not limit their usage to just elementary. Almost any idea can be adopted and adapted for older learners as well. Just think about whatever you teach, how could students show that they've learned that? And these ideas, although basic, are meant to be a starting point for you to then develop and branch out and really the sky is the limit when creating with iPad apps. So before I show you my personal favorites, I definitely want you to learn from the advice of Tony Vincent and he's put together this really great infographic on how to use web and mobile apps for students to show what they know. I'm going to click on it now and you can also access it later on from the link. Now his infographic is quite lengthy and it has a lot of different categories of projects that students could show what they know with apps. I'm going to click on the full screen version here and Tony has updated this infographic several times. So hopefully the information is current even though apps are constantly changing and the price may change or the link or the icon and what it can do. But like I said, as a starting point, think about students showing what they've learned in the form of an audio recording built into an iPad or a free app that's available. Part of the Apple Tools suite is GarageBand collages making a collage of what they've learned. I recommend Pick Collage out of his suggested apps here. So it's a visual flyer or a poster that can be used for students to show both images and text of a topic that they've learned about. Comic strips. My personal favorite in this column or this row is the strip designer app. So a paid app, you can do a lot of elaborate or simple comic strip type posters with that app. Digital posters. Some more is the website that I'm using to actually share my app suggestions with you but also these others are really great for creating those online digital posters. Slide presentations. Just like we teach information through slide presentations, we can also have our students show what they've learned through slide presentation. Google Slides. Definitely a possibility. There is an app that works on the iPad for the students to create their slideshows. Hikudeck and or Keynote. Again, an Apple app. So it's native to the iPad. You can make very stunning visual presentations and then record your voice on top of them if you wish. I'm going to talk about digital books and my favorite app Book Creator for doing so. But you can also try out some of these free options. And Narrated Slideshows. So again that idea of Google Slideshows or Keynote presentations but this is sometimes a little bit more limited to use something like Shadow Puppet EDU or 30 Hands. And sometimes limiting students options for creation helps them focus more on the content and get that project completed quickly. So that's a choice to look at for showing what they've learned. Of course creating movies will be something that I do highlight in this Wednesday webinar and animations and screencasts as well. But there's additional app options that are suggested on Tony's infographic here that might be worth checking out if you're limited by cost or some of the other details that I may share with you. And then finally Study Aids and this is a really neat approach as well if you're willing to try something like Thinglink. It's got an app and a website that you can use to develop kind of a clickable poster so that an image or a graphic organizer can become interactive and students can link the content they've learned to their initial Thinglink poster. So like I said this is a really great starting point but already pretty overwhelming in the options and the choices. So just use that as a reference on beyond what we talk about today and for now I'd really just like to focus on simple ones to get started and again my personal favorites. Starting with Chatterpicks. Chatterpicks basically gives your photos a voice so students either take a picture of something or they upload a photo, find it online. Finally they draw a line for the mouth and then they record their voice making that object talk. It's a completely free app. There's a Chatterpicks and a Chatterpicks Kids version. They just basically have a different kind of look and feel to them. The same simple app and this is what a student project might look like. My teeth do have a sharp bite but don't you understand that I get tired of a diet of paper every day? I like to be patted on the back but gently please I have an important job to do of holding things together. So that's a simple personification example where the stapler has a mouth drawn with a line with your finger in the iPad app and then the voiceover brings that mouth to life. Those saved to camera roll can be exported very easily. Sock Puppets is my second app that I would like to highlight here. Again very simple and a little bit limited in the fact that it can only record 30 seconds per video. Sometimes I prefer that for students not to be able to go on and on. They've got to limit and focus their ideas to a short amount of recording time. One of the real assets of Sock Puppets is being able to or the app changing the sound of the student's voice. So when students are self-conscious about hearing themselves in a recording, this one can be a great way to alleviate that fear. So the 30 second recordings are just acted out with the Sock Puppets available. Not a lot of choices here, very simple to use and then of course can be saved to the camera roll and shared however you choose. Here's a super quick demonstration of the Sock Puppets app. I'll launch it. Start a new project. Choose a character or two. Choose a background or two. Decide if you want props or not and set up the stage. Now as I hit the red record button I move around the puppets and it will change my voice in the recording and animate it back. So here we go. Hello, have you ever heard about a vocabulary word that we are learning about in class? Oh, I would like to know what that means. I'll hit stop. Here's the vocabulary word we learned. What does it mean? I would like to know. If you want to advance your puppet show style animations with a little bit more advanced iPad app, I encourage you to use one of the Puppet Pell's apps. They've been around for a while and they have a lot of really great possibilities built into them. They are very kid-friendly and can be adapted to those older age students very easily. The app itself is free but you just get a limited number of puppets. So it would be very kind of similar to Sock Puppets. Does not change the pitch of your voice when you record it. But if you pay for a paid version, either the director's pass or the school edition for Puppet Pell's 2, then you can make your own puppets. So you can cut out photographs that you take or images that you find online or drawings that you've made on paper and those can become the puppets that you then move around on the screen and bring to life along with your voiceover. The main difference between Puppet Pell's 1 and 2 is that in Puppet Pell's 2, like you would see in this book trailer example, the wheels on the car move, the background kind of moves, it has more of a different feel to it. But again, both have value. I'll just show you a little piece of this one explaining parts of speech, adjectives, adding adjectives to your writing. An example of a simple sentence is the girl walk down the sidewalk. Man is here. I know what you need. Adjectives. Here are some examples of adjectives. OK, and here's a short example from Puppet Pell's 2. I will be telling you the story of crossing the wire. It all starts with Victor Torres. Victor is a poor boy with a poor family that is barely surviving. Their family is desperate for money and food. So Victor makes the courageous decision to cross the wire. So Victor sets off on his journey to cross the wire. On his journey, he had many troubles. He met many people. At first. And so you kind of get the sense of what's possible there. Again, you can adapt those ideas to any topic in any content area very easily. Maybe you're going to show the main idea of a story or a history topic explained through the student's eyes. It could be something where you jigsaw ideas out and each student takes a different topic and then teaches it back to the class. It could be something like vocabulary terms that are acted out in these apps or retail historical events. And I'm kind of moving to a little bit more advanced or I should say structured type of an app with TuneTastic. This is a completely free app. So a lot of possibilities. And what it does differently than puppet pals is it encourages students to use the entire story arc to retell their story. So again, this could be a made up story that I'm retelling through my creation as a student or it could be a story that I just read and I'm going to show my understanding or it could be a true story from history that I'm going to reenact through my creation. But you can have a variety of media choices in the app. So you can cut out pictures like you did in puppet pals. Even with the free version, you can draw things and draw backgrounds and draw objects and you can use photographs that you pull from the web or that you take with the iPad camera itself. I've got a blog post on one activity done with the TuneTastic app and there's another app from the same developer that's also free called Telastory that would be worth checking out. But for now, you can take a look at this shoe story example and get some ideas of what you might build when you encourage students to go through all the parts or all the elements of a story and tell it back in their creation. Next on our slate is a well-known app, iMovie, probably most commonly known for creating videos and editing them on either the Mac or the iPad. But if you just take the trailer option when you start a new project and choosing iMovie trailers, it really kind of limits the open-ended possibilities of video editing and again gets kids to focus on just the content. So these are preset length, duration and scene length of each piece that goes into the trailer. You also automatically get some background music that fits the theme of the iMovie trailer you've chosen. And one thing you don't have the option of doing is adding your voice. So this would just be the true feel of a movie trailer that you might watch. Now, Tony Vincent also has a wonderful guide on how to use iMovie trailers in the classroom and some different storyboards that would go along with each of the trailer themes, both on iPad and Mac. And I would show you a piece of a student example on animal habitats here. What I think is really nice about the iMovie trailers is that they're easy to put together. You just have little drop box spaces to drop your content into. You can pull that content either from filming yourself with the iPad like you saw in Rebecca's example and or pictures that you find online from copyright friendly websites. So she did that as well. And you can see a lot of variety in the student projects based on the iMovie trailer template that they start with. So that's really fun to see how the student examples can all look so different and have a different look and feel and kind of flow to them. So with a quick project, I encourage you to try out iMovie trailers. Next is Adobe Spark Video. This was formerly known as Adobe Voice. You may have heard of the app in the past. I really like this app for creating public service announcements or commercials or just really short videos. Again, where you don't have a lot of time to go gather images or create video clips to use in the project. You can create your own pictures and pull them in and video clips, but it's really easy to pull them out of the library copyright friendly media that it's linked to along with the background music. And then you can add your voice on top very easily. So in the example I'm gonna show you here, this PSA was made within the time period of one class period. Took less than one class to create from start to finish. So here is a public service announcement made by students. Have you ever heard how to change your clothes? Do you use a school dress cover? What makes a skirt considered too short? Or what makes a shirt inappropriate? You may have questions. But we have answers. Respect the dress code and remember. Keep it classy and don't be a human anatomy lesson. So the one downside to Adobe Spark and the suite of tools that come with Adobe Spark Video is that students do have to log in. So students under the age of 13, you will probably need to create a class account so that they're all actually logging in with the same login to access the tool or the app itself. In the upper grades, this isn't near as a roadblock because students can create their free Adobe account and then log into the app and individually use it. They also have a graphics creation app called Spark Post and a scrollable webpage or a poster with interactive media on it called Spark Page. But this is Spark Video and a really great way to create some media in a quick format. Next is probably, if I had to choose a favorite app that I would use in the classroom, this is probably near the top of the list. It's Explain Everything. And although it's a paid app, it's one of those apps that's worth every penny you pay for. You can use it in any subject, any age. I like to use Explain Everything as a teacher to actually explain something I'm conveying to my students, but it also works great for students to show what they've learned and create the animation themselves to teach someone else. So think of it as a digital whiteboard with unlimited slides that you can add your voice on top of and animate as you record. The finished recordings in Explain Everything can be shared in nearly unlimited ways. So they can be finished videos like you'll see here in this example from students. They can be actually saved as, to the camera rolls, right, straight to YouTube as editable projects. So you can go in and fine tune things. You have a lot of choices. Are you saving to Dropbox? Things like that. There's a couple of free resources here that I would highly recommend if you're interested in getting started with Explain Everything. There's Lesson Ideas, a free book for iBooks from Apple Education, and the Explain Everything website does have some student project examples and more information on how to get started with the app. So many great student examples. It's hard to choose one here. I'm gonna show one on plate tectonics. Scroll ahead a little bit. Boundaries. Divergent boundaries are when two tectonic plates move away from each other due to magma moving around underground. They form rift valleys in mid-ocean ridges. The phenomena that occurs are volcanoes and earthquakes. A geographic location where divergent boundaries are are a mid-Atlantic Ridge and the African Rift Valley. Transform boundaries. Transform boundaries are when two plates slide past each other in either the same direction or in opposite directions. When the plates slide past each other, they cause earthquakes as shown here. So here's a quick tour of the Explain Everything app. I'll launch it here. It goes to my dashboard with my different projects saved for me. I'll start a new project with the plus button. Choose a color scheme. And now I can design my slides and get them ready for recording. Each of the tools on the sidebar has additional options underneath of it and of course, different colors down below. If we wanted to animate a math problem, for example, I could have it ready on the slide. I could advance to the next slide with the plus button in the bottom slide navigator and add objects or shapes or pictures or whatever I'm going to need to explain my everything. There's typed text and a variety of objects which you can bring in with the sidebar, including laser pointers and arrows that really help illustrate what you're explaining. When I finally got my slides designed and ready, now I'll get ready to do the recording with the red record button. Anything that I do on the screen is animated and saved and moved. As I move it, it's saved. And of course, my voice is added to it. So let's try to solve this equation. I'm going to get a different pen ready. Maybe I'll go to a blue color here and hit record. So the first thing I have to do to solve my equation is isolate my variable. I'll subtract one from both sides of the equation, leaving me with three X on this side of the equal sign and nine on the other. Now I need to divide both sides by three. You get the idea. I can advance the slide here and move things around and resize them and bring in additional pictures even on the fly as I'm recording. When I hit stop, this movie file is actually a full movie, editable with its own timeline down here across the bottom where each of the recordings is saved on the slide. So back here on slide one, this is what I did and recorded and I can go in and fine tune that if I'd like. Hopefully you can see how you're able to animate the items that you have either on the slides or offstage ready to pull in and how that movement and animation combined with your voice can really show a deeper understanding of a concept. Again, any subject area, any age, you can explain everything. And finally, Book Creator here. Again, another paid app that's worth every penny and I also like the option with Book Creator that you have to download the free version and create one complete book to get started and see how you like it. If one book is all you wanna make, then you're set and if you want to build more than one book, then you can buy the paid version for 4.99 with before VPP, before volume purchasing. So now Book Creator, I know it sounds like you're creating digital books and you are, but the power is really in how you share it. You can share it not only as an EPUB or digital book, but you can also just export it as a PDF that you print off. So think, you know, paper books or print offs that you would send home. And finally, my favorite is just to export it as a video so that all of the narrations on the pages, all of the videos, all of the pictures and drawings that students have put onto the pages just become one standalone movie. That's what you'll see here in this student example. I'm gonna pass the title page again. Who did normal things? He played with toys, he loved sports, he also did many crafts. I had one dream. His dream was to play with the Nebraska football players. It all started when Drew watched his first Nebraska football game. He wanted to be just... Really what I enjoy Book Creator for more than anything is how easy it is to drop things on the page and add drawings if you wish or typed text. And my favorite part is the audio narrations. So when students are putting together a project for science or social studies, they can bring it to life by reading what they've written on the page in their own voice. Then when exported in video format like you saw here, it really makes that book come to life. I have a blog post that I wrote on a second and third grade science project with Book Creator that kind of explains the process of how we did it. And it's also worth mentioning that Book Creator allows an entire class to individually author on their own iPads and then send to one teacher iPad and combine into one class book. And that can be very powerful too. So students could just literally create one page, maybe an about me page or a jigsaw topic or project where everybody takes a different piece, maybe an alphabet book, and then they all send them to the teacher's iPad and you have one class book then to share. So it can again make what might seem like a daunting task, creating a book more manageable for the classroom. Now, these were just my favorites today and I would love to share with you even more ideas for showing what you've learned with iPad apps. If you're willing to do a little more reading on your own, I encourage you to download another free book for iBooks from Apple Education called Fostering Creativity with the iPad. And this book talks about different apps that you can use for student projects where the students are creating and not just consuming content. I'm sure you understand along with me that this makes the learning stick a lot better. It gives them that deeper experience of having to retell it back to someone in their own words and higher level thinking skills, along with the creativity that kids can infuse. It's a better assessment of students' learning than just that formative type assessment or the traditional quiz or test. We can see a small portion of what they've learned that way, but when we see them bring it to life in one of these ways, we can see a lot more about what they understand and what they haven't quite yet mastered. So if you have any additional ideas for apps to include on this list for our viewers, feel free to share them with me at KDADSU8.org. And if you wanna get started with a project, if you have an idea, if you want to even make a decision about which app would work best, feel free to contact me anytime. Thanks for listening and have a great rest of the week.