Looking for fun resources for teaching literacy that won’t break your budget? Here are some of my favorites.
Talking Tom Cat: Kids talk to Tom, and he repeats in a funny voice everything that’s said. Within seconds, the students’ words are recorded as a video of Tom talking that can be uploaded to YouTube and Facebook or sent by email.
StoryKit: Create an electronic storybook by drawing on the screen, uploading images, recording sound effects and voices, and more.
Fotobabble: Quickly create and easily share talking photos in three steps.
StoryCorps: Listen to the weekly interview; share life stories via email, Facebook, and Twitter; get tips for recording interviews on mobile devices.
Read Me Stories—Children’s Books: A different talking picture book every day teaches children new concepts and new words and how to say them.
Puppet Animation Lite: Kids animate uploaded images or sample puppets and animate them by choosing Swing, Elastic, or Scaling; they save the animation as a GIF to send via email or Twitter.
Library of Congress Virtual Tour for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad: Highlights exhibitions and architectural features and includes photos, audio, links, and video.
Animoto: Upload images, choose a soundtrack from the library, and click a button to make a 30-second video. Sync your video with your animoto .com account, download it for offline viewing, and make longer videos with an All-Access Pass.
K12 Timed Reading Practice Lite: 25 short, engaging stories for K–4 readers that feature a variety of fiction and nonfiction and 10 Flesh-Kincade reading levels.
Tales2Go: Free for 30 days. Instant, on-demand, and unlimited access to more than 1,200 stories from leading audio publishers and storytellers.
Chicktionary Lite: The chicken bobs its head and clucks when kids use one of their letters to make a word. The “beak sneak” option fills in one letter of each of the words not yet found.
Kid Apps: 13 in 1: Thirteen applications including math games, more than 600 flash cards, interactive tracing drills, the ABC s, counting, vocabulary, number and letter tracing, a Math Whiz quiz, a musical-instrument vocabulary, words for (and pictures of) things around the house, and more.
—Shelly Terrell is an educator and guest blogger on techlearning.com.
