Shadow Puppet

Shadow Puppet provides students and teachers with some great opportunities. With Shadow Puppet, students can take pictures and create a picture slideshow with their voice recorded over the images. There have been several apps that perform similar tasks that I have reported about in the past. (30 Hands and Videolicious.) However, the controls on this app are a little more intuitive. The other thing I like about it: the product is stored in the cloud. Much like StoryKit and Story, a link to the actual product can be found online and viewed in that location. So the length of the recording is less of an issue because you are not sending a large file over email or to a blog.

In order to use Shadow Puppet, each teacher will need to do the following:

1. Open the app and create an account.
2. Sign each iPad/iPod into the account.
3. Make sure all parents have signed consent for you to use it. (This step is already taken care of at registration for ENSC employees.) 

So how is this app usable to you? Students can make whole presentations from the app. They can take various pictures or collect pictures online. To add to the presentation, students could use Skitch to annotate the pictures with text and arrows. Then the students can record their voice over each picture. Lastly, the results can easily be posted on a website or blog because the teacher will be provided with a link or even an embed code.

Opportunities such as this redefines the learning experience.

I just received an email today about a new update from Shadow Puppet. The new version features an automatic save to camera roll feature. Great idea that will certainly assist our primary elementary students when submitting work. 

(12/19/2013 update)

By creating a class account, the student recordings go to the entire class as well as your own iPad. There are some advantages and disadvantages to this process. The major key is organizing it properly. Train the students to respect each other's work. Also train them to put their name as the title. This will help with keeping all the work as it comes to your device straight.