Friends,

A few months ago, I told you about an app that I was excited to use for student research projects. Mad Lips allows you to put your moving mouth and voice onto a still picture. Here’s an example, made by a teacher.

Cute, right?

DO NOT TRY THIS WITH YOUR STUDENTS!

I tried this with a wonderful class of third graders in my school library last week. The app kept crashing. And crashing. And crashing. Students actually began to cry. I felt horrible.

For the next class, we tried Videolicious and had great success.

This is a FREE app. Students saved images to the camera roll, then recorded themselves talking. They could have added background music, but we didn’t have time for that. They had their scripts already written, and they finished their videos in 30-45 minutes. And we all had fun!

One drawback to Videolicious is that you can only work on one video at a time. Completed videos are stored in the camera roll, and they can be emailed. That’s how we turned our assignments in, by emailing each video to the classroom teacher.

Here’s an example of one of our student videos. She is talking from the point of view of Phillis Wheatley.

If any of you have favorite video creation apps, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!