In, out, on, and under

Learning which preposition to use can be tricky for second language learners. There are a couple of apps that can help. Speech with Milo from Doonan Speech Therapy has one version that focuses on prepositions, and Mobile Education Tools has just released an app called PrepositionBuilder.

I used Speech with Milo - Prepositions last year, and although it's not the most exciting of apps, the kindergartner I was using it with loved Milo the mouse. Designed for use by speech language therapists with a view to using it with kids on the autism spectrum, the mouse does seem to be popular with younger kids. Although most of the animations are very clear, there are a few that are potentially confusing. The preposition 'under' for example, is illustrated by Milo getting IN a submarine that then goes UNDER the water. This is not an app that students would use by themselves - it is designed to be used with an adult's guidance. There is nothing built in to the app to track a student's progress. In the settings you can decide which of the prepositions will be presented at each sitting. At $2.99 it is relatively cheap.

 PrepositionBuilder is significantly more sophisticated. Unless an adult is sitting with them to read the sentence prompts, students need to be able to read in order to choose the correct preposition to complete the sentence. However, once they have chosen the correct answer, the app will read the completed sentence to them. When a student gets an answer wrong, the image on the screen changes to represent the sentence that they have created. Although kids will enjoy getting the sentence wrong, the app is still reinforcing the correct way to use each of the prepositions. Students can record themselves reading the correct sentence, and that recording can be emailed to the teacher. Even if you are right next to the student listening to them, sometimes it's nice to have a recording that documents a student's speaking skills! Some students may find it harder than others to manage the recording and saving process by themselves.

PrepositionBuilder keeps track of each student's progress and rewards them with animations when they get answers right the first time. You can save profiles for multiple kids. At $7.99, this app is clearly more expensive than Speech With Milo, but I think with the added features you get your money's worth.

Storytelling apps compared - update

Here is the link to my updated spreadsheet comparing some storytelling apps. I've added 3 more apps since the last version (highlighted.) Apps included in the comparison are:

• Our Story
• Pictello
• SodaSnap Postcards
• SonicPics and SonicPics Lite
• StoryKit
• StoryPatch
• StoryRobe
• StoryMaker
• StoryPages

All are obviously intended for the creation of stories, but the final products vary from a single page with images and text, to multipage stories with images and text and audio, to a video that is basically a narrated slideshow. 

Visit my Storytelling page for  a quick overview of all these apps as well as several animated storytelling apps.  My side-by-side comparison of the animated storytelling apps is on a separate spreadsheet. 

Storytelling with Our Story

The free app Our Story was developed by child psychologists and education specialists at the Open University in the UK. The app is backed by solid research and the website is worth checking out as it offers suggestions for ways to use the app that are equally appropriate to other storytelling apps. 

"Reading, even in the digital age, is probably one of the most important skills that children acquire. It can be an important source of pleasure which also develops vital language and social skills. It is fundamental to most school activities, it can also open up new worlds and give access to the wealth of human knowledge. 

This app that has been developed by child psychologists and other specialists at The Open University enables young children to take part in fun games which can help develop interests and skills that will be relevant to them when they start to read." 

The app and its support pages are very clearly geared towards parents using the app with their children rather than teachers using it in the classroom. 

Some of the nice features - 

• you can create a selection of images from your photo album that you want students to use directly in the app. You can also add more photos as needed from the photo album. 
• You can add text to each image, and the text is saved so that you can reuse it if you use the same image in another story. 
• You can add a recording to each image. 
• The images are large because there is no screen real estate saved for the text - it goes over the image. 
• You can easily see how many images you have in your story and what order they are in. 
• You can use images one at a time, like flashcards, without adding them to your story. 
• You can see the text as you are recording. (It is not hidden by a recording window as it is in StoryKit for example.) 
• Text boxes are scrollable.
• It's free and there is no advertising! 

Some drawbacks - 

• You are limited to creating 10 stories. After that, if you want to create more you have to choose which of the stories you've already created you want to overwrite. 
• The app has quit on me several times as I was trying to create a story. 
• You cannot move the text boxes on the screen and they often end up obscuring part of the picture. You can double-tap on the page and the text and navigation tools will disappear. They reappear when you double-tap again. 
• Navigation is not terribly intuitive - I'm not sure that young kids could figure how to navigate back to a saved story - certainly not as easily as they could in StoryKit for example. 
• When you are 'using' a story, the icon to play audio shows up on every picture even when there is no associated audio. 
• There is no way to share the stories beyond the iDevice they're on, with the exception perhaps of an iPad2 hooked up to a projector! 

This app has some nice features and, given that it's free, it's worth the download. The inability to share the final product is a dealbreaker for me right now though in terms of using it with my ESL students. I can see uses for Our Story for social stories though - especially given the ease of adding images using the camera in a 4th generation iPod or iPad2 - and also for other adult-created stories or activities. If using the story right on the iDevice where it was created suits you, then this provides a nice alternative to other apps and can provide some variety in the look of the apps you are using. 

Storytelling with Pictello

Pictello is yet another storytelling app. It is designed for both  iPhone and iPad, but will not work on older iPod touches (2G)  or iPhones (3G). It comes from AssistiveWare, the company that created the assistive communication app Proloquo2Go. Pictello creates a book-like end product - a story of one or more pages that can have pictures and text. You can record sounds for each page, which could be a reading aloud of the text. A unique feature of Pictello however, is that it comes with built-in text-to speech voices and you can have it read aloud the text that you add to each page. You can even read some pages aloud yourself and use text-to-speech on others! The latest version highlights individual words as it does text-to-speech, which is a helpful feature for literacy goals. The current version of Pictello is localized in English, Spanish, French, German, Turkish and Dutch. North American English male and female voices are included, with children's voices and voices for 25 other languages and dialects such as Japanese available as free downloads! Pictello does not require an active Internet connection for story creation or playback.

Pictello was originally designed to create social stories, but it looks like it's a great tool for encouraging storytelling and literacy skills for all kids. However, it is significantly more expensive than the other storytelling apps I've reviewed so far. (It was $14.99 when I first wrote this and is now $18.99 as of 4 April, 2013, admittedly with some new features.) The stories you create can be viewed on the device where they are created, within Pictello, or they can be shared via the Pictello server - but only with other Pictello users. The latest version will let you save your stories to Dropbox as Pictello stories or PDFs. If I were working with students who were able to write their own stories but unable to read them aloud, I would be more interested in this app specifically because of the text-to-speech feature which I've not seen in the other storytelling apps. For my regular ed. students, the free app StoryKit is very similar, is free, and StoryKit stories can easily be shared via the app's website.

Assistiveware provides detailed descriptions on their website to help you get started using Pictello.  a4cwsn has several videos that give detailed information on using Pictello. (Here is the first of their videos.)

(Updated 5 April 2013)

Storytelling apps compared

As a follow-up to my comparison of animated storytelling apps, here is a spreadsheet comparing some other storytelling apps. Apps included in the comparison are:

• SodaSnap Postcards
• SonicPics and SonicPics Lite
• StoryKit
• StoryPatch
• StoryRobe
• StoryMaker

All are obviously intended for the creation of stories, but the final products vary from a single page with images and text, to multipage stories with images, text and audio, to  a video that is basically a narrated slideshow. 

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

Digital storytelling with Sonic Pics

SonicPics is another app that lets you create digital stories with pictures, sound, and (with a little thought and another app) some text too. Here's a quick overview:


A more detailed tutorial:


4/7/11 ETA: SonicPics Lite, which is free, limits you to only 3 pictures in a video, but as Apple employee Jim Moulton pointed out at a conference today, this is not necessarily a problem. Three pictures (and 10 minutes of recording time) is enough for a story with a beginning, a middle and an end!

2/6/12 ETA - SonicPics Lite is no longer available.

Digital storytelling with StoryRobe

StoryRobe is another way for kids to create digital stories using photos or digital copies of their own artwork. Once they've selected the images they want to use and put them in the right order, they can record the text to go with the images. They can talk for a total of up to 3 minutes, and synchronize the images with what they are saying by tapping the screen as they talk to advance to the next picture. StoryRobe creates a single video file that can then be shared.

Unlike StoryKit, there is no option to add text to the finished product, as  the model is more video-like than book-like. There are ways to add it it to the pictures however. Students could handwrite text on their original artwork before it is digitized, or use an app like Comic Touch ($2.99) or Comic Touch Lite (free, reduced feature set & watermark on output) to add captions or speech bubbles to the images and then save them to their photo album before adding them to the StoryRobe project.

I initially thought that one drawback to working with StoryRobe is that once you start the process of adding pictures to your story, you really have to complete the story (including adding audio) in one sitting. There did not seem to be a way to save works in progress. I later found that Storyrobe does sometimes save works in progress.

I have not always been successful in creating StoryRobe stories - the process seems to fail at the point of creating the finished video. Because I have managed to get short projects to work, I think this may be because I have included too many photos, even though the audio recording was within the 3 minutes allowed. Because of this, I have not yet had students try to use it. For my purposes - working on writing and speaking - I already have a workable product in StoryKit. Once I figure out what makes StoryRobe fail I will be more likely to use it with students, but I'm not going to have them work on a project knowing that it may well never reach completion!

Here is a very short video I threw together using StoryRobe and Comic Touch Lite while sitting in the car one afternoon waiting to pick my kids up. (The Comic Touch Lite logo does not show up on the first image because of the way I cropped it.)

 

I'd given up trying to get longer videos to save properly! I thought this one hadn't either , but when I checked my photo album later it was in there!

The following video gives a good overview of how StoryRobe works. There are also directions on the StoryRobe website that you could print out if needed.**  The video creator mentions that Story Robe costs $0.99 - it is in fact free at the time of this posting. StoryRobe does not yet come in an HD version for iPad, but will work on one.




**Addendum: Less than 2 days after I originally wrote this post, the Storyrobe website disappeared for several days . . . It did reappear again, but given that and the tendency of the app to crash (Wes Fryer also commented on this), I think Sonic Pics will be less frustrating to use in school.

Digital storytelling with StoryKit

StoryKit is a free app for both the iPod and iPad that allows the reader to create digital stories. When I first downloaded it, I didn't get the point right away and thought it was just another, not very good, ereader because it comes with three books included on its bookshelf. Once I figured out that it is intended to create books as much as to read them, it suddenly became a LOT more interesting!

The first time I used it with students was with a group of 1st graders. They created a book for me on paper first and only once that was finished did we start the process of transferring the book to the iPods. For their books (about animals) the students had drawn pictures. As I already had a large collection of animal photos on my computer, I loaded the relevant ones onto the iPods for the kids to use in their StoryKit books. For the next project I did with StoryKit, my second graders were writing personal narratives and in this case I scanned their hand-drawn images and loaded them onto the iPods. Students can also draw pictures directly in StoryKit, though the quality (certainly on an iPod as opposed to an iPad) tends to be not as good as images kids draw on paper.

All the students VERY quickly got the hang of navigating their way through StoryKit. It was good to see them being critical of their audio recordings, and choosing to re-record and re-record (without any prompting from me) until they were happy with what they heard. Without exception, as soon as they had finished, they wanted to share their stories. They went back to their regular classroom teacher and wanted the whole class to see their story, and they went home and showed their parents the story from my website. In all my years of teaching, I have rarely seen such enthusiasm from students for sharing their writing!

Here is a YouTube video on using StoryKit on an iPad. The creator comments at the end that when she uploads her finished stories to the StoryKit website the sound does not work. I have not found that to be the case.



Here is a sample photo story educator and technology advocate Wes Fryer put together using StoryKit about visiting China. Wes embedded it into his blog page. Here it is on the StoryKit website.

Here is a podcast (over an hour long) that you can download that details a University of Maryland research project using Story Kit to enable families to create digital stories. It includes some good ideas on ways you can use the software.

Things to be aware of about using StoryKit:

• there are definitely some logistics involved in getting images onto the iPods for the students. If you have newer iPods with built-in cameras, (I don't), I suppose you could take photos of the students' hand-drawn images. I run them through the photocopier/scanner which then emails them to me. (As fast as a making a regular photocopy, and much faster than using a 'regular' scanner!) 
• Depending on your tolerance for background noise in the finished product, it may be difficult to find a quiet enough area in school for the audio recording.
• You can add more than one audio clip to each page.
• When students are recording their stories, it is definitely helpful if they have a written version that is not on the iPod to read from because the recording window hides the page where a student may have entered text.
• Typing is still a new skill for most younger kids and can go very slowly. I will admit that, given the luxury of very small groups of students, I have had students type one or two pages in their story and I have helped them finish up.
• The text box can be moved up and down the page, and you can 'pinch' or 'stretch' the text box to resize it somewhat. 
• The spelling/auto-correct feature on the iPods can be helpful, but can also be incredibly frustrating when it repeatedly 'miscorrects' a word.
• If you use the paint tools, make sure not to paint where your text will be. Even if you enter the text first, you will not be able to see it while you are painting. 
• The shared projects are hosted on the childrenslibrary.org website.  There is no way to directly upload a finished story to another website (though of course you can link to the project at childrenslibrary.org.) There is no way to download or save the finished projects to share in any way other than through the website or on the iPod. Compare this to an iMovie which can not only be uploaded to a website but also saved as a DVD. Should the childrenslibrary.org website ever shut down, all the projects published online will vanish :-( On the other hand, free access to the childrenslibrary.org site means that if students create stories on an iPod at home, they have a way to share it without having to have their own website.
• The iPod you create the story on has to be set up to send email so that the story can be shared. 

Finally, if you use StoryKit, you can let the developers know what you think of it right here.