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Sock Puppets lets your younger students create video using sock puppet characters, add settings and props. Student can then record their voice and the characters will lip-synch to create voices for the characters. Students can work together to create multiple characters, adding another way that teachers can have students create thoughtful responses to literature. Videos can be posted to Facebook and Youtube, if desired.

My students have also loved this app! The videos that are created can be saved onto their iPad which is great if they want to go back and view it later. I love how easy it is to move the characaters and change their size. The students really enjoy how their voice is changed when they listen to it. As I mentioned on another site, it is fun for students to use two headphones and a splitter to create their video together. I had one group of students work on creating one in a group of four using a five way splitter. This can also be used for interview each other or made up interviews of characters from literature.

GarageBand is amazing, and we think it's worth $14.99 because it's used so much with our music students. But, we've used it as our main voice recorder in Spanish classes, and in library, because of its high quality recording. It's easy to use and easy to export audio tracks. Obviously would be too expensive just for this one use-- but If you use it across the curriculum like we do, it is perfect!

To use GarageBand for voice recordings, a few changes need to be made. My students picked this up quickly, and even though it sounds like a pain it really takes just seconds. (1) Touch the wrench in the top right. You will need to turn the metronome 'OFF' for voice recordings, so you don't hear the tick tock while you are recording. My students like to leave the 8 beat intro on, to give them a countdown and make sure they don't start talking too soon. 2) Touch the puzzle piece in the top left. You will need to set the track length from the default of "8 bars" to "automatic." This way the recording doesn't stop after 8 bars but continues for as long as you want.

Our preschool autistic students love GarageBand more than many other touch/music type apps. They know how to choose an instrument (guitar, keyboard, drumset, etc.) and then they can touch the iPad and hear the sounds. The drumset is a clear favorite, followed by the keyboard!

Dragon Dictation is an easy-to-use voice recognition application powered by Dragon® NaturallySpeaking® that allows you to easily speak and instantly see your text or email messages.

Students can narrate pictures and create short videos using this simple app.

This free app lets you add your voice to your pictures and creates a personalized short video you can share on Facebook, YouTube or email!

This app helps students create screencasts with their own drawing and voices.

While this may seem like just another drawing app, the students in my library have really enjoyed this one. It is easy to maneuver and gives you lots of options. You can change the type of line you want to draw, how thick the line is, and the color. It also offers many different backgrounds, stamps in two sizes, four fonts, and stencils. I have had young students draw response pictures to stories that we have read in the library and they turned out great. You can email the picture or take a screen shot. You can also turn the sound off and on which is always nice if you don't have headphones.

This app can also be used to create text or drawings that can be imported into other apps. Anything in the camera roll can be chosen as the background for a doodle. When a student completes a doodle, they can save it into their camera roll. My students used this in their Voice Thread presentations. They essentially created their text slides in Doodle Buddy, saved them to the camera roll and then in Voice Thread chose them from the camera role.

Disney offers this book app for free and it is a great example of the many features that can be found in an ebook. You can select young reader mode, read to me mode, or record your voice to listen to (great for fluency practice). The best feature of having it read it to you is that it plays your voice over the music which makes it sound very official. There are a few coloring pages and games that students can also look at. Very fun and a big hit with my youngest iPad users (preschool and kindergarten).

Voicethread for the iPad just arrived, and it's amazing! It allows students to create narrated slideshows. It also has many many options for hosting open discussions of media where invididuals "comment" in various formats (e.g. written, voice, video). Voicethread can upload a broad range of audio and visual format. The voicethread app is free. Free accounts allow for up to the "voicethreads" per user. I paid $60.00 this year to obtain a one-year classroom account with 50 student accounts which I can manage and supervise very efficiently.

The VoiceThread app has exciting possibilities for students to present their research in a new way. My students used a combination of text slides created in Doodle Buddy and screen shots of images to create slide shows. They did voiceovers on top of the slide show and could even draw on the screen to point out the part of the diagram that they were referring to. One other exciting game-changer is that students can listen to another student's voicethread on their own ipad and then respond to it in text or record their own response. Then the student presenting (and teacher) can read and listen to the feedback. Some of these features are limited on the free version, like only 5 voice threads per account. There is more teacher control on the paid version as well. I'm definitely considering buying the full version.

Evernote is an easy-to-use, free app that helps you remember everything across all of the devices you use. Stay organized, save your ideas and improve productivity. Evernote lets you take notes, capture photos, create to-do lists, record voice reminders--and makes these notes completely searchable, whether you are at home, at work, or on the go. I like Evernote because it doesn't require wifi to look at your notes.