I tried out the Story Buddy App last week with a 4th Grade Class. Story Buddy is an app that can be used to write and publish a story. Students can add text, choose paper, add photos, write, draw, and add audio. There are a lot of font and color choices to create a specific look. I liked having the option to rearrange pages, edit, and share the book. The book can be emailed, sent to the device's iBook Library, printed, or downloaded to your computer with iTunes file sharing. If you add audio to the story, it is all lost when you share the book via email, in the iBooks library, or downloaded. It will be a PDF file. Another thing you need to know is that your creation cannot exceed 15 pages. I wanted to share the Poem 4C created with the you, so I decided to use Reflections to record their work directly from the app. This is the only way to currently preserve the audio that is added to the book.
Working with 4C
-Students wrote a class poem.
-Each student was assigned one line of the poem.
-Each student was responsible for creating one page in our book.
-Each student was asked to brainstorm and be ready with an idea for a photo they could take at school or a picture they could draw to make their line of poetry visual.
-Each student had 5-7 minutes to create their page.
-One student recorded the audio.
Good Job, 4C. Here is the amazing poem they created with StoryBuddy.
I tried out the SonicPics App yesterday. It is an app that allows you to add pictures to create a slide show with audio. You can add a title and description for each photo. They do not stand out, but appear nicely in the slideshow, if used.
This is what I did at home with my little Kindergartener at home.
Plan out the project:
-Take pictures-My daughter is learning about patterns in kindergarten. We decided to look for patterns around the house. I handed over the iPhone and let my daughter take a few pictures. Then we decided it would be fun to make our own pattern and take a photo of it.
-Add pictures to SonicPics- Select the pictures in the order you would like them to appear. I have not found a way to reorder pictures.
-Practice-We talked about what she wanted to share with everyone about patterns. I gave her time to scroll through the photos we added in SonicPics and practice.
-Record Audio- My daughter pressed the record button and explained the patterns she saw.
-Share- Save your work to the iPhone/iPad library, YouTube, e-mail, or send it to your computer.
Here the SonicPics Slide Show/Video we made with the pictures we gathered last night.
