Tech Tuesday

Finds and Thoughts about Tech Integration

Read Our Lips

November5

Recently, I attended an excellent MassCUE workshop presented by Timothy Harkins that focused on integrating iPads into elementary science. This session reinforced the idea that it’s best to choose a few apps and use them for many purposes. From this session, one easy to use app that I added to my must try list was Funny Movie Maker.

This app lets the user create a 3o second talking avatar movie. The gist: use a pre-made picture in the app or snap your own. Cut out a mouth in the picture, and then record yourself or someone else’s mouth doing the talking. This movie can be shared to Photos (and then accessed from the device via Dropbox), or emailed right from the app. The exported movie file can be inserted on a blog or web page for an audience.

One word of caution: the available pictures in the app’s library can be a little suspect… and even strange… imagine muscle men and a lot of fruit. Therefore, taking your own pictures with the camera seems like the best option. Students can create a hand drawing, make a clay figure or use a toy figure to depict their character/subject.

This app can be used for any content area, letting students report research findings, explain their thinking or explore a different perspective. Any object can be personified and given the chance to speak its mind, inspiring creativity.

On Halloween, some fifth graders participated in a voluntary project: create a pumpkin to represent the main character of a biography or “boo-ography”. On the spur of the moment, we seized the opportunity to bring these pumpkins to life with the Funny Movie Maker app.

So, go ahead and read (or rather, watch and listen to) our lips!

(Please double click on the embedded movies below.)

4 Comments to

“Read Our Lips”

  1. November 5th, 2013 at 10:39 am       Kathy Doucette Says:

    Could this work with the fourth graders self portraits with an autobiography?


  2. November 5th, 2013 at 3:25 pm       Stacey Says:

    The kids did a great job with very little rehearsal. I can’t wait to do it with the whole class for something.


  3. November 5th, 2013 at 6:27 pm       lsanderson Says:

    Kathy- we could make talking self portraits or pop art! Andy Warhol would have loved it!


  4. November 5th, 2013 at 6:32 pm       lsanderson Says:

    Stacey, I, too, was impressed at how students were able to give me a quick sentence or two on the fly. I think the app has a lot of potential!


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