AirDrop Video Sharing, 5 Photo Stories and Narrated Slideshows

Today in Chickasha, Oklahoma, I led a “bring your own iPad” workshop for Storychasers on “Narrated Slideshows and Screencasts with the iPad.” This is the first iPad workshop I’ve led since updating my iPad2 to iOS 7. In the morning, we viewed and discussed different examples of student-created narrated slideshows and screencasts. These included:

Ejyafjallajokull: Our 6th Grace Science Volcano Project (created with Explain Everything for iPad)
How to Measure Liquid (created with ShowMe for iPad)
Probability by Ben and Jerry (created with fancier computer screencasting software by Eric Marcos’ students)

These are student project examples I’ve shared previously on day 1 of iPad Media Camp, and also on the Narrated Slideshow / Screencast page of “Mapping Media to the Common Core.”

This afternoon, participants and I created a “5 Photo Story” about the Three Little Pigs, and then independently created narrated versions of it using Explain Everything. One of our participants used her iPad Mini to create our “whole class demonstration video,” in which I tried to expressively narrate our tale. Afterwards, this provided an opportunity to transfer the video using AirDrop from her iPad to my iPhone. I learned AirDrop works on iPads which are version 4 and newer, the iPad Mini, and iPhone 5 and newer models. To use AirDrop, you need to enable both wifi and bluetooth, and (in this case) in “control center” enable AirDrop with EVERYONE. It was amazing how fast the video transferred over from her iPad Mini to my iPhone5! The video is just a minute long, but it transferred over in less than 2 seconds. You have to click ACCEPT when someone tries to AirDrop you media, like a photo or video.

In addition to AirDrop, we used the “email to a draft post on a free Blogger site” trick to share the 5 photo story we created with each other. I also demonstrated how the app PhotoSync ($2 for photos & videos) can be used to transfer media between iPads and laptops. I mentioned Instashare (free for photos & videos) and Image Transfer (free for photos, video transfer costs $) as other app options we’ve experimented with during past iPad Media Camps.

Here’s our final sixty second narrated video about the three little pigs. Note the amazing and powerful use of augmented reality for our wolf character!