Puppet Pals

Puppet Pals allows you to manipulate up to 8 movable characters or images on up to 5 backgrounds while recording  your voice. The free version includes 7 characters and 3 basic backgrounds. The free version can be used for open-ended story telling activities or expressive language lessons, but you quickly end up purchasing the Director's Pass upgrade, which allows you to use any photos from the photo roll.

When my fourth graders were researching New York State, I wanted them to create infomercials about each region.  First, we viewed travel infomercials and charted their styles, information, catch phrases, etc. They then read books, did internet research (from pre-selected links on the class blog), wrote scripts and found pictures online.

I chose Puppet Pals as the recording tool because it would enable the children to get as close as possible to a green screen effect without using video cameras or green screens - which are not yet an option on the iPad, anyway. They would be able to cut out pictures of themselves (and objects) then move them around on the background as they spoke.

The children loved playing around with the placement of their pictures and the objects. They learned about internet searches, taught each other about the New York regions, and were  proud to send the videos to the governor. However,  they would have liked to add text, and they were frustrated that every time they made a mistake they had to restart from scratch. We also had some sound quality issues, but that was because of our headset adapters. The project took longer than expected, so I ended up putting them together in iMovie instead of the children doing it on their own, and that took quite some time because I had to trim off the distracting "Made Using Puppet Pals" title page that is added to every video. Looking ahead, if Puppet Pals does not add some improvements, I might use Explain Everything for this project. It does not have backstage options or the child-friendly interface of Puppet Pals, but it can technically accomplish the same thing,  works well with Dropbox, and it can be used for a greater variety of projects.

Samples Sections:

Searching for a Recording Solution

There are so many opportunities for recording and sharing on the iPad: Dictation, story telling, discussions, assessments, performances, voice to text, etc. However, how many teachers or students actually use the iPad in a silent room? How many teachers or students do anything in a silent room, for that matter?

Hence, my search for the perfect noise-canceling, iPad-friendly microphone headset...which I have yet to find.

For now, I am using a funny little combo of a regular headset + adapter + sound proofing tape + electrical tape (or a USB headset with the Apple camera adapter kit).   This allows up to 5 or 6 children to record in a room at once with minimal background noise. As long as my students keep the microphones at the proper distance from their mouths and the adapters do not fail, (as there were some that did not pick up any voice at all) the system works.  I will not give up on recording even though the projects will not sound perfect. I will just continue my search for a more convenient, reliable system, or better yet - an iPad headset that works.

My Maps Editor

This summer, a kind stranger shared this document:  26 Interesting Ways to use Google Earth in the Classroom. I was getting ready to pilot a 1:1 iPad program, and here were 26 cool things that I could do...just not on iPads!

And then I discovered My Maps Editor, the only free app that syncs with Google  Maps, which then syncs to Google Earth. That means if I am teaching about continents, my students can circle, color code, or label the continents, save their work to their Google accounts, then open then open the map in Google Earth to see it all on a movable, interactive globe. When learning about New York, we can trace the outline of the state so it stands out in relation to the rest of the world. We can zoom in and out of our current location to talk about the different sized communities in which we live. We can create a virtual tour of New York State by creating bookmarks on each city and hyperlinking them to pictures or websites. When learning about explorers, we might draw color-coded lines to track each explorer's journey,  calculate the distances, then attach videos or text notes about each one.  The number of possibilities is extensive, but not endless.  It would be nice if one could undo drawings, access old versions more easily, and select a map more smoothly. It would be even nicer if all of the computer options (KML files, etc.) were available on the iPad.  For now, My Maps Editor is all I have.

I'm hoping that by the time my students are ready for more advanced  functions,  My Maps Editor will put out an upgrade, there will be a newer, better iPad app, or they will each have a laptop that is as fast and light as the iPad. My eyes are on the Microsoft Surface Pro...

Please note: Mapedit (1.99) and Map Editor (1.99) are also worth exploring.  MyMap could do more than all of them, but it has ads and more than 30 dollars of in-app purchases.