20 Fun Free Apps that Promote Student Centered Learning & Literacy

20 Fun Free Apps that Promote Student Centered Learning & Literacy
Posted by Shelly Terrell on Wednesday, March 7th 2012    


Lately, I have discovered many cool free apps that are incredible for creating digital stories, reading stories, and interacting with stories. These apps are incredibly engaging and meet the needs of our diverse learners. They allow learners to interact with the plot, characters, and even design of the story. They also support multiple learning styles because they are visual, have sound, and animation. Students can even begin to craft their own stories using their voices, drawings, images, videos, and so much more! Check out each of the apps in the playlist I created with a really cool free tool, Mentor Mob, which helps educators organize online learning content into a simple Learning Playlist platform.

Create your own Playlist on MentorMob!

Lesson Ideas

Below are a list of the apps and a few activities. You can visit each app by clicking on the playlist above.

• Woices.com Location Based Audioguides- students can create tours about various locations around the city. Have them research the history behind a place and tell the story behind that place for others to listen to when they visit.
• Animation Creator HD Lite For IPad- students can create their own animations for a story. They can use this app to create the characters for a story and even add audio. Have them create dialogues, flesh out characters, or create graphic novel type stories with the animations they create.
• IAnimation I App- instruct students to take a series of pictures for a story they will be creating. Students can use this app to animate these stories, then string these together for a digital story.
• Bubble And Pebble Story- kids will love helping these lovable characters undergo adventures. Kids can then create their own Bubble and Pebble drawings of a new adventure then share these stories and drawings with their peers.
• Toontastic – students can create stories based on cartoon characters.
• Journal Jar – students simply shake this app to get a writing prompt. Give them about 5 to 10 minutes to come up with stories based on this prompt.
• StoryKit App- students can create detailed books about their lives, what they imagine, or change the ending of a classic story. This app allows students to take old classic books like the 3 Little Pigs and edit the pages. Students can even tell the story from a different point-of-view.
• Fotobabble App- students take a picture and tell the story of that picture. Have students take a picture of their favorite place and talk about it or if you are reading a story, have your students take a picture that reminds them of a scene from the story and explain why they chose that picture.
• VoiceThread- students can post videos, drawings, images and more then have their classmates comment on what they upload.
• Choose Your Path Free – students finish this Choose Your Own adventure type of story.
• Videolicious- have students create video stories about themselves. They can try a 3,2,1 introduction where they list 3 places they would like to visit, 2 of their hobbies, and 1 embarrassing moment.
• Posterous- have students create poems or audio stories.
• Flixlab – another great app for making movies.
• Sock Puppets- great for collaborative stories in pairs.
• Puppet Pals
• Animoto Video Creation App
• Shmuppet – students create a podcast or tell a short story with a puppet and send them to their friends via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
• Bunsella Bedtimes Story- students narrate a children’s story and send to a children’s class in the local elementary or a younger brother or sister or for children in another country. They children then can respond to these read stories.
• Audioboo- create a podcast of local news around the school
• Create A Comic Android App- students can create comics about any topic you choose
• App Store – Narratavius Story Engine – Interactive Fiction And Text Adventures- a choose your own adventure story
• MindBlowing App For Idevices- students collect audio and video clips as well as images under any theme. This is a multimedia mindmap app.
• Talking Tom & Ben News Reporters- students create dialogues that reflect any news item worldwide and around the school. Kids will love when Tom and Ben report that news.

Challenge:
Use one of these ideas in your classes!
20 Fun Free Apps that Promote Student Centered Learning & Literacy