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:
