This is my fifth post on using iPads in my classroom. In case you missed it, you can read Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, and Volume 4 as well. In this post I’m going to share with you a video my students made using the incredible Adobe Voice app.
Every year in June, I have my students make a video for next year’s incoming students, showing them what they will learn in a fun way and sharing their thoughts on what helped them learn. This year I decided to let students use the iPads to create the videos. I allowed students who were all caught up to work on this while I worked with students who were behind, so they had very little guidance from me while they made this. That being said, they really did a great job.
Adobe Voice is a video-making app that’s sort of like PowToon but less comic-y. It’s only available for iPad. Users make slides for each idea they want to present and then add text, icons, or photos, as well as record audio for the narration. The photos are all Creative Commons photos and are automatically cited at the end of the video. You can also upload your own photos. The app has a number of songs you can use in the background as well as professional-looking themes and fonts to choose from. It has just enough options to spur creativity but not so many that it’s overwhelming.
I basically gave the students a list of all the topics we learned this year, had them open up Adobe Voice and make example sentences showing what types of things they will learn how to say. They were also free to share their experiences in English using the iPad’s camera in video mode. I combined all the videos and edited them in MovieMaker to make one long video. For this blog, I edited it down further and took out the student interviews. The clip you see in the beginning was done by a student in his own time. He was the one who brought the app to my attention and he made the video to show to incoming middle schoolers at our orientation night. I thought it was perfect for this video as well. I cut off all the credits slides and put them all together at the end, which seemed more logical then putting them after each video, since it’s supposed to play like one big video.
The students had a lot of fun making this and I think next year’s students will really enjoy it. In my next installment, I will share how students used Adobe Voice for another, much different project.
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