Puppet Pals, the iRig microphone and digital storytelling projects

Since I first posted about it back in March 2011, I haven't actually used Puppet Pals again with my students at school. On 19 January, 2012, Wes Fryer posted on his blog "Moving at the Speed of Creativity" about his experience of using Puppet Pals with an afterschool program at his church. He has some good suggestions for making the process work smoothly. One interesting detail in his post is the fact that he has uploaded 3 student-made videos. One of them was recorded using an iRig microphone. The others used the microphone in the iPad. Clearly there was background noise going on in all three videos, but the one recorded with the iRig microphone is noticeably a MUCH better recording! I have the luxury of working with small groups of students and a small, quiet, space to work in most of the time but after seeing/hearing these videos on Wes' blog I think I'd like an iRig microphone anyway - and for working in a regular classroom where several groups might be working at the same time I would DEFINITELY want a good microphone. I will certainly be recommending to the classroom teachers I work with that they try to get one. At $59.99 apiece maybe DonorsChoose can help!

Wes also commented on the need to get the students to plan their play. I agree with him 100% when he says:

"With just about any multimedia project, getting students to plan, get organized, and in some cases WRITE is the hardest part of the entire experience. It’s also the most important, however, because it contributes the most to the eventual success and quality of the project."

Lisa Johnson, blogging at techchef4u, has written a very helpful article on using Puppet Pals with students. Her suggestions for topics to use with Puppet Pals would work equally well with many of the other storytelling apps.

If you are looking to sell the idea of more technology to your school/school district, storytelling projects like this clearly show the students using important skills for academic success - planning, writing, organizing . . . And yet, despite the work that goes into a project like this, most students will still perceive the project as being fun.

Animated Storytelling Apps Comparison

After doing the reviews of the different animated storytelling apps I decided to make this spreadsheet to compare them directly. While they have many features in common, they are obviously not identical and one may suit your needs better than another. I can actually see teachers wanting different apps for different purposes, for different types of project, or different age groups. I've tried to make sure to include features that teachers want to know about - such as "Can kids save a project and go back to it later?" Given the constraints of school scheduling, and the reality that kids in different classes may be using the same iPod/iPad, this can be a make-or-break feature in terms of an app's usability in school. If I've made mistakes, or not commented on features you want to know about, please let me know! Prices are today's and may change, as are app version numbers.

This spreadsheet only lists animation software - I'll do another one for apps that create book-like or slideshow-like products.

Spreadsheet last updated 5 May, 2011

Sock Puppets for Storytelling

SockPuppets is another app that lets you create short animated stories.You get to choose one or more of several 'sock puppets'  and a background for your show. The basic app is free but, just as you can with Puppet Pals, you can buy more puppets and backgrounds as an in-app purchase, starting at $0.99 for individual items or $4.99 for the complete package. You can also add some props. While recording your dialog, simply tap a puppet and that puppet will 'lip-synch', tap a different puppet and switch auto lip-synching to it. You can switch backgrounds to take your puppets to different places, move the puppets, props and scenery to animate them while recording.

SockPuppets is very simple, and very cute. I like that the puppets' mouths open and close, giving an extra element of animation to the finished video with no effort on the part of the students creating the animation. One feature, that I haven't seen in other animation apps, is the ability to change the pitch of the voice for different characters. In other words, one person could record both sides of a conversation and by having the app alter the pitch of their voice it could sound like two different people talking. The finished video can be saved to the iPod/iPad and watched on it, or you can export it to be shared. Unfortunately, the only options for sharing right now are Facebook or YouTube, both of which are often blocked in schools.

Here's a video created in Sock Puppets that I found on YouTube - a conversation between 2 students who are learning to speak Chinese:

Storytelling with Toontastic

(Review updated May 5, 2011 on release of version 1.1 - see below for additions)
Toontastic (iPad only) is yet another app for creating cartoon stories. Toontastic 1.0 provides more built-in structure to the process of story creation than any of the other apps I've reviewed so far. The company website says it is for the creation of:

an animated story made up of different types of scenes: a Setup, a Conflict, a Challenge, a Climax & a Resolution. Together, these scenes form the Story Arc. Toontastic guides kids through the Story Arc, introducing key concepts and helping them to define the turning points in their stories.

I downloaded it and let my daughter and a friend play with it this weekend. They had previously played with Puppet Pals and really liked it, so I was interested to see what they thought of Toontastic in comparison. One thing they really liked is being able to use their own drawings for backgrounds and characters. They liked that the pre-made characters were editable to some extent - they could change their colors. They also liked that the provided characters had arms and legs that moved. I noticed that characters automatically turned to face the direction in which they are dragged across the screen, whereas in PuppetPals you have to double-tap a character to make it turn around. The girls commented that they thought the characters were easier to manipulate in Toontastic than in PuppetPals. They also liked that you can choose the background music for each scene. (Personally, I would like to be able to choose no music for some projects, but the music choices do at least tie in with the Story Arc concept, helping to reinforce it.) 

The second time the girls played with it, they paid more attention to the Story Arc than they had done the first time. Without any prompting from me, they even figured out that it would be helpful to plan out on paper what their story was and they wrote out much of the script.

Projects in progress can be saved so you can go back and continue to work on them later - a key feature for storytelling apps being used in school, where it may not be possible to complete a story in one class period.  Finished projects can get saved to/shared via the ToonTube website, but saving projects there is optional. Projects uploaded to the ToonTube website can be embedded in another webpage, such as your class webpage or even Facebook. 

Despite the extra support built in to this app to encourage a good story structure, students will still benefit from planning their story out away from the iPad and then having enough time to rehearse and probably record their story more than once. This app is ideal for collaborative work as more than one voice is usually needed for a finished story. Like PuppetPals and Sonic Pics, the final product is a video and not a digital book (as StoryKit's is.) And of course, if you don't have an iPad, you can't play with Toontastic at all :-( 

For other opinions of Toontastic, here is a detailed review of it on the IEAR website, (written January 2011) and another written by Geek Dad at Wired Magazine. 

ETA: Toontastic 1.1 was released on May 4, 2011 and adds some useful features. There are a few more provided characters (or 'Toys' as the Toontastic team calls them), and more provided backgrounds. The drawing tools for creating your own backgrounds and characters have been improved with adjustable thickness brushes, fill and undo functions. Characters and backgrounds that you create are now automatically saved so that you can reuse them in different scenes and stories :-) If you need to get rid of characters that have been added by the kids, just like in iOS with apps, tap and long press a drawn character in the toy box until it starts wiggling.  You'll see a trash icon on the top left of the character, tap that and it will delete the character from the toy box but not from any of the movies it has been used in. Apparently saving to the ToonTube website, or viewing projects there, is now much faster. There is a Toontastic wiki where you can see ideas on how other educators are using Toontastic. 

Storytelling with Playtime Theater

Playtime Theater (iPad only) promises to be an outstanding app for creative storytelling, and has been well-reviewed. With built-in production elements like sound effects and music, it seems as though it would beat Puppet Pals hands-down, especially as a volume purchase would bring the price even lower than Puppet Pals. Unfortunately, just as the current version of Puppet Pals has its flaws, so does version 1.0 of Playtime Theater.

The company does plan on releasing more sets and characters in the future, but for the moment I feel the castle set is limiting for school use. The most significant problem for me, though, is that Playtime Theater 1.0 does not allow you to save or export your stories. Without that option, I might want a copy for my kids to play with, but would not want to use it yet for classroom projects. Hopefully, later versions will include this option as otherwise it has some very cool features. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this one!



Edited April 5, to add: David Katz and Seth Levine of Make Believe Worlds were kind enough to let me have an evaluation copy of Playtime Theater. They write that they are

"a small "2 dad" company...which means we still have "day jobs" so there are still some rough edges, but we are trying to get an update out very soon that will address a few of the known issues. [ . . .] we are basically just two guys from Van Nuys with day jobs in “the industry.” We both are Television editors with over 25 years experience between us. So, storytelling is something we have always enjoyed."

Having now actually had a chance to play with Playtime Theater, I think this would be very cool for younger kids to play with and I know my kids will love it. The app does some very cool things, with windows and doors opening to reveal characters, and characters being able to move around from one place to another in the castle in a way I haven't seen in other apps. It allows kids to create something that looks quite complex really quite easily. The inability to save your finished shows is a serious flaw though - crucial for school environments where projects often have to carry over from one day to the next due to scheduling constraints. Although the show you are currently working is saved when you leave the app to go and do something else on the iPad, I have not seen a way in Playtime Theater to save your show so that you can then work on a different one without losing the first.  I am still convinced that this is a product with great potential, both in the classroom and particularly out of it. I will be looking out eagerly for what shows up in the updates! Check out their You Tube channel for more videos that will give you a good sense of what it can currently do.

Storytelling with Puppet Pals

Years ago, I used a piece of software called Hollywood, from a company called Theatrix, with my middle school ESL students. The software provided sets and characters to choose from and the students wrote the dialogs and stage directions that made the cartoon characters move around on screen.  My students really enjoyed working with it. They worked on their language skills as they wrote the dialog and social and cultural skills came into play too with the topics I assigned. Although the computer did the talking for them, they got to work on their pronunciation when they listened to the way the computer pronounced their dialog - they occasionally had to deliberately misspell a word in order to make the computer pronounce it correctly!

I recently discovered an app for iPod and iPad that is similar to Hollywood. Puppet Pals also allows students to create 'plays' or 'movies' using provided characters and backgrounds. I downloaded it and within minutes my daughter and a friend were playing with it, creating a story. It is a little harder to use than Hollywood in some ways, in that Hollywood allowed you to create a script which controlled when the characters moved and how. With Puppet Pals, you drag the characters around the screen with your finger as you talk. The iPod/iPad records the audio as you move the characters around. I can see students needing to create a script and rehearse several times before they come up with a movie they are happy with. Hmm - just like a real play!

It does take a little getting used to how to move the characters around the screen - it is too easy to make them shrink or grow enormously tall without meaning to. You can pause the recording, but there is no way to go back and edit what you have already recorded.

The app comes with a limited collection of characters and backgrounds. You can get more with an 'in-app' purchase.  The Director's Pass is the best deal, with one fee entitling you to download all the currently available characters and backgrounds. You can then also 'cut out' characters from your own photos to use in your stories! Although you can not draw your own characters directly in Puppet Pals, if you plan ahead carefully you could draw your characters, digitize them, and add them to the photo album on the iPod/iPad. You would then be able to cut them out from there. I have a colleague who teaches pre-school and although this app may be too difficult for her students to use, I can see potential in teachers using it to create 'social stories' with familiar backgrounds.

My first attempts at using it were only moderately successful. The videos we made on the iPad saved OK and were viewable on the iPad, but turned out to be too big to email to myself so I could put them on my website. I bought the Director's Pass for my iPod, and found that videos did not save properly at all - all I got was one second of video! At this point (version 1.2.012), I can't recommend downloading it. It has some great potential, and I will be downloading updates as they become available, hoping that they are going to iron out the technical glitches. From what I've seen on their website, they do seem to be very responsive to customer comments, so I'm hopeful that this will soon become a more usable product.

Here's a video from the creators of Puppet Pals, Polished Play, on using the software. 



Puppet Pal for iPhone/iPod
Puppet Pal HD