I'm in love with the ease of use and polished look of Adobe Voice (and Adobe Slate, but I'll get to that in another post!). It's an iPad only app, so that's something to be aware of when you're considering using it in your classroom, but the students LOVE it (and so do teachers!). Here are a couple of examples of Voice projects. It takes five to ten minutes to show the students how to use the program, and then they are able to jump right in and create their projects.
Voice is a slide show that plays like a movie. It allows the creator to add slides with images, icons, text, and voice recording. They can also change the theme of the project (and those themes can be customized, which also changes things like the fonts), and they can change the background music or remove it completely if desired.
The program is so simple, and yet the projects look polished and each project can look distinctive and unique. We've been using them with ALL ages and all ability levels, and they have consistently been successful. The elementary school students get the hang of the programs easily, but the program is not too juvenile for middle or high school students. As a matter of fact, adults use this program all the time to create awesome projects. Voice features some of the public projects on their site under the "explore" tab, so you can quickly see the wide range of ways that the program gets used.
As far as sharing, it's incredibly easy to get the projects off of the iPads. When the creator is finished, s/he can just hit the icon on the top right of the screen (it looks like a box with an upward arrow), and then they can choose how to share the project. Most often, we have students choose the clipboard and then paste the URL that they get into a Padlet or in Google Classroom. (The nice thing about Padlet is that everyone can see each other's projects, and they can all be presented easily from the same location. The nice thing about Classroom is that the projects can be a bit more private.)
This week, in the classroom of Janie Thames, who teaches English 9 at Spotswood, students took a body paragraph they had written for a persuasive essay. She had them underline the key words in each sentence of the paragraph, and she had them highlight the different parts of the paragraph (the topic sentence, their first example with support, and their second example with support). For the Voice part of the project, the students took the words they had underlined and used each of those words or phrases to make a slide. They chose images to represent each of those words. Then, they had a slide for their topic sentence, a slide for their first supporting reason or example, and a slide for the second supporting reason or example.
It was an awesome activity to accentuate the power of word choice, and it gave students more ownership over their ideas and their writing as they used their own text to create the project. They read their paragraphs along with their slides, and that gave them more power over their language as they used their voices to share their writing. The best part was that the program is so simple that the students were able to complete the entire activity and post their responses to Padlet within only an HOUR. Minimal time invested, awesome results. That's something I love to see!
Voice is a slide show that plays like a movie. It allows the creator to add slides with images, icons, text, and voice recording. They can also change the theme of the project (and those themes can be customized, which also changes things like the fonts), and they can change the background music or remove it completely if desired.
The program is so simple, and yet the projects look polished and each project can look distinctive and unique. We've been using them with ALL ages and all ability levels, and they have consistently been successful. The elementary school students get the hang of the programs easily, but the program is not too juvenile for middle or high school students. As a matter of fact, adults use this program all the time to create awesome projects. Voice features some of the public projects on their site under the "explore" tab, so you can quickly see the wide range of ways that the program gets used.
As far as sharing, it's incredibly easy to get the projects off of the iPads. When the creator is finished, s/he can just hit the icon on the top right of the screen (it looks like a box with an upward arrow), and then they can choose how to share the project. Most often, we have students choose the clipboard and then paste the URL that they get into a Padlet or in Google Classroom. (The nice thing about Padlet is that everyone can see each other's projects, and they can all be presented easily from the same location. The nice thing about Classroom is that the projects can be a bit more private.)
This week, in the classroom of Janie Thames, who teaches English 9 at Spotswood, students took a body paragraph they had written for a persuasive essay. She had them underline the key words in each sentence of the paragraph, and she had them highlight the different parts of the paragraph (the topic sentence, their first example with support, and their second example with support). For the Voice part of the project, the students took the words they had underlined and used each of those words or phrases to make a slide. They chose images to represent each of those words. Then, they had a slide for their topic sentence, a slide for their first supporting reason or example, and a slide for the second supporting reason or example.
It was an awesome activity to accentuate the power of word choice, and it gave students more ownership over their ideas and their writing as they used their own text to create the project. They read their paragraphs along with their slides, and that gave them more power over their language as they used their voices to share their writing. The best part was that the program is so simple that the students were able to complete the entire activity and post their responses to Padlet within only an HOUR. Minimal time invested, awesome results. That's something I love to see!
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