We’ll look at three free video-creation apps – Toontastic, Clips and Adobe Spark Video. All are easy-to-use for video storytelling and are popular with teachers and folks who want to produce fun video content for their social networks.
Students will be organized into teams and assigned one of three apps. Teams will “figure out” their assigned app and prepare a sample video and brief instructional review to share back with the full class.
There will not be any instruction on how to use the apps – we want students to be able to experience the learning curve for a new user. Plus we will be relying on students using their own iOS and Android smartphones – also known as BYOD (Bring your own device).
More on each app
- Toontastic – a Google project for creating animated stories. It runs on iOS and Android phones and tablets. Also select Chromebooks. No social network sharing features.
- Clips – an Apple project that makes cool videos designed for sharing on social media. Think Instagram on steroids. It is iOS only and runs on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Built in social network sharing.
- Adobe Spark Video – Part of the Adobe Spark suite. Built in storyboards allow you to integrate images, video, sound. iOS. Runs on iPhone, iPad. But also can be used with desktop browser. Built in social network sharing.
Assignment | Posts 19-A7
Student will pick one of the apps and use it to tell a story. Here’s some ideas for writing prompts
- A myth, fairytale or folktale
- A quick synopsis of a book or movie
- Something instructional
- Another great idea you have for a story to tell
Outputting the videos – there are multiple ways to do this. Here’s a few:
- Toontastic videos can be moved to your iPhone photo gallery. If you then move them to a Mac desktop, you can upload to YouTube using QuickTime Player. Then embed YouTube video. We’ll figure out the Android method.
- Clip videos can be uploaded to YouTube directly from the Clips App. Then embed YouTube video.
- If you use the desktop version of Adobe Spark Video, you can get an embed code for your video.
Your post should include an embedded examples of a video made using the app. If you upload the video to YouTube, you can use the YouTube block on WordPress with the URL of video.
If you use Adobe Spark Video you can use HTML Snippets with the embed code.