One of the challenges facing teachers in BYOD classrooms is finding apps and sites that will work on a wide variety of devices. Creating multimedia projects like videos and interactive images is a great way for students to share things they’ve learned through research and or share their thoughts about things they’ve learned. The following five tools will work on a wide variety of devices in BYOD classrooms.
SoundCloud – SoundCloud is a great tool for creating short audio recordings. Those recordings can be embedded into blog posts. The feature of SoundCloud that makes it worth using instead of just embedding a recording from another service is that listeners can tie their comments to an exact moment in a SoundCloud recording. This means that if something twelve seconds into the recording triggers a thought in a students’ mind she can tie that comment to that exact moment. I’ve seen SoundCloud used by world languages teachers who have students make short recordings and post them on a classroom blog. The teacher then used the comment tool to give feedback to students. SoundCloud is available as an Android app, as an iOS app, and as a web app.
Magisto – Magisto is a free video editing app available for Android, iOS, and Chrome. The app allows you to add music tracks and some simple effects to your raw video footage. If you have a series of clips you can string them together in one video. To create your video you can use footage that you have captured with your device’s native app or you can use Magisto to capture new footage. After you’ve uploaded the media that you want mixed, select a theme and music for your video. Magisto creates your video after you’ve completed the steps of uploading media, selecting a theme, and choosing music. The final video is emailed to you. On the Magisto website you can create albums of your videos. Your albums can be made public or private. If you want to create a group album, you can invite other Magisto users to contribute to an album. From an album you can download videos and grab embed codes for your videos.
Audioboo – Audioboo is a free tool for creating audio messages to share on the web. Using Audioboo you can record messages on your mobile device using Audioboo’s free Android or iPhone apps. You can also record messages directly on the Audioboo website. Messages that you create can be shared by embedding your recording into a blog or website. You can also share messages by posting them to Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.
Thinglink – ThingLink is a free tool for creating interactive images. ThingLink can be used in the web browser on your laptop, in the Chrome browser on an Android tablet, or through the ThingLink iPad app. To create an interactive image upload an image from your computer to your ThingLink account. After uploading the image you can add pins to the image. Each pin that you add to your image can include a video clip, a link to another site, a SoundCloud recording, an Audioboo recording, a block of text, or another image. You can make your images collaborative by allowing others to add pins to the image. Images can be embedded into blog posts for students to view and or add their own pins. A few of the ways that I’ve seen ThingLink used by teachers is to have students add multimedia labels to diagrams of cells, to label geographic features, and to label historical images like that of the signing of the declaration of independence.
Animoto – In my mind one of the original audio slideshow tools is Animoto. It’s been around for a long time (in web 2.0 terms) and it is still a good tool for students to use to bridge the gap between slideshows and videos. Through the Animoto website, Android app, and iOS app Animoto makes it possible to quickly create a video using still images, music, and text. Animoto has an option to include video clips in your videos too. If you can make a slideshow presentation, you can make a video using Animoto. Animoto’s free service limits you to 30 second videos. You can create longer videos if you apply for a free Animoto for education account.
