June 23, 2014
Chatterpix and YakIt: Great Apps to End the School Year – from Samantha Morra
This post first appeared on Free Technology for Teachers.The year may be winding down, but you still have your students for a few more precious weeks of school. If you have access to iPads in your classroom, a great end of the year activity with your students is to make pictures talk, create animations that anthropomorphize objects, or use personification to demonstrate understanding. It’s actually a great activity anytime of the year. You can create with your students and keep them engaged and learning right up until the last day. Two fantastic sets of apps for creating talking pictures on iPads are ChatterPix / ChatterPix Kids and YakIt / YakIt Kids ($.99). With both sets, the non-kid versions provide additional sharing features such as uploading to e-mail and social media sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, while the “kid” versions only save to the Camera Roll.

- 30 seconds to record.
- Add stickers, frames, or text.
- Send movie to the camera roll.

- Several different types of mouths. Spend a little time aligning the points of the mouth and chin to create an interesting effect.
- More stickers. Create different types of faces on imported objects.
- Change the pitch of the voice. Instead of a standard recording, make some audio tweaks. While this may seem like a very simple change, I have found that being able to change the voice brings out more from our introverted students.
- Multiple scenes. Rather than just one taking image, string together several different talking pictures.

