Sock Puppets

This week, I got to the opportunity to use various apps and websites to describe a story. Storytelling is key to any classroom environment. The app that I ended up selecting was called Sock Puppets. Sock Puppets is available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Sock Puppets allows you to create a video using different sock puppet characters. To begin, you first pick out your characters then decided what kind of background that best fits the story. After that you have the option to use various props within your video; however, props that have a red box around them can not be moved once the recording process begins. If a prop has a yellow box around it that means that you can move the prop around during the recording process.
I worked on this video with the collaboration of my fellow colleagues: Lauren Reitz and Savannah Smith. https://drive.google.com/a/setonhill.edu/file/d/0BxVW0j44-iM6U1lqYmNUS3d6bXcyUzlsaXNicTZacW1vRmlJ/view?usp=sharing We decided to create our story about two students fighting over a microphone and then we described how they must learn to share. At the end of the clip, we had the two students apologize to each other for not sharing. This video would be good to present to younger children about how to share his or her toys. The only problem that we had with this tool was that it only could record for 30 seconds, since we had the free version. We wanted to incorporate classroom rules on how to share, but with the short recording timing we could not talk about it in our video. If you plan on using this app in your future classroom, I would invest in getting the $3.99 version so you could have the longer recording time.
I would use this in a classroom to just switch things up instead of just reading from a hard back book. This app also allows students to be creative with storytelling without having to come up infront of the class to present or role play. This app gears towards students in elementary school. I think this would help a teacher that was teaching kindergarten-2nd grade make creative reading lessons, but have 2nd-4th graders actually creating their own stories. Sock Puppets app is a little confusing for some students just because there are multiple steps before you even start recording. Once you start to record you have to press on the character that is talking so his or her lips with sync up with your recording after you are done. Saving the story can be a little confusing because basically, you can save it to your camera roll, email, or directly post it to your youtube channel. Overall, this tool would be a great addition to any future educator going into early childhood education to incorporate into his or her classroom.