Community reviews for Shadow Puppet Edu

Shadow Puppet can also be used by students. Students can create their own videos about their learning to share with friends and family.

A fun way to integrate a variety of tools to educate and report. This gives my students a chance to learn and present as they desire. I think multiple uses would help them use it more efficiently and purposefully, but it is easy enough to use for a one-time assignment. It has many options leaving it possible to use many times, though.

This is a wonderful teaching tool to move our students from passive consumers of content to creators. It is perfect for even the youngest learners to share their work, their ideas, their learning with a broader audience. I like how easy it is to use, the prompts are simple and straight forward. All you have to do is click the photos you want, organize them in the order that you want, click record, add any graphics, click next, keep going until you're done. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out, but the final product is high quality!

This tool allows students to create a video to demonstrate their learning. It even lets students learn more by watching others' videos or lessons.

I think this app is an excellent tool for digital storytelling at the elementary/primary level. I appreciated the ease of use, the guidance the app gave through the creation process, and how the app allows the students to make simple decisions about their story to minimize confusion while using the app. I feel one way it could be improved would be more music options for background music without the need for pre-loaded music on your device; my students wanted popular music options but I was not ready to load my whole iPod library for them to have free reign. Overall I believe this app would be useful for students at any grade-level, but it is refreshing to see something marketed for digital storytelling for younger students that has been proven in the classroom to work!

It's a good tool for younger students as their first exposure to voice recording and presentation. 5-6 year olds need to use it with assistance, while older ones can use it independently. However, the text feature is not that great visually as sometimes the text spills over the picture frame and hence gets cut. So, I feel it's a good tool for recording a narrative with pictures, but not that great of you have to add too much text.

This has recently become one of my top 10 educational apps because of its ease of use, richly embedded, educationally appropriate resources, and easy sharing capabilities. This app leads you step-by-step through the creation process (Step 1: Pick a few photos or videos; Step 2: Add narration, text, and music; Step 3: Share) Because it's so easy, it appears that many have tagged this as an app for elementary students, but I feel very strongly that it can be used in the upper grades as well, even high school. I specifically like using this app with science and social studies teachers as this app contains ready to use images from well-known and reputable resources such as the Library of Congress, Met Museum of Art, NASA, etc. You can even use the Map search to quickly add a map to any creation. These resources alone save a lot of time in class. As opposed to students taking the time to do a Google search to find images that match what they've learned, they can search these libraries that are already in the app. The Library of Congress, for example, contains fabulous primary resources that are at your student's fingertips. Students can spend more time on the content versus finding images. I also like how this app helps to develop speaking and presentation skills. When students are recording, they can use annotation tools to draw attention to certain aspects of the presentation and re-record if the playback is not as fluent as they would like. Lastly, I appreciate the help section of this app which includes a video tutorial as well as step-by-step directions on all aspects of the app. In addition, this Shadow Puppet includes an idea section where you can filter by subject or type of activity. All activities are aligned to the Common Core Standards. I highly recommend spending some time here to get some inspiration for other uses of this app.

Overall, I recommend this app gets installed on all my K-8 iPadsl. For the price (free) what you get is amazing. Older students might feel a little limited by the music choices (only 8 songs) but once students have their own apple ID, they can also access their iTunes music. (for us this is grade 9) A few more song choices would be good. (This tool reminds me of a program we used to use called PhotoStory which had built-in music that was arranged by mood. A few more songs and arrangements by "mood" would be a nice addition to this app.) Shadow Puppet would be a quick tool for teachers to offer as a choice of how students will "show what they know" since the learning curve is so flat and they will be able to require kids to focus on content not learning how to use the app. The final projects are quality movies kids can be proud of, too!

I think this is a tool that teachers need in their classrooms. It takes sharing student work to the next level by allowing the student to record. This allows them to express their thoughts and explain their work. It allows parents to see what is happening in the classroom while hearing from their child about that work. Sharing with parents at conferences becomes easy because students can create a quick portfolio of their work, no more papers to flip through and what parent doesn't love to hear their child talk about their work. It is easy to use but editing, while can be done, can be tricky. Students enjoy using Shadow Puppet EDU and are motivated to do their best on their work so they can use this tool to showcase what they know. Even the shy students get involved and start speaking up with Shadow Puppet.

Great free tool to encourage creative expression and comprehension