ChatterKid App

When I stumbled upon this cool app, I couldn't wait to share it with my teachers and students!

The app is called Chatter Kid, and I can think of so many possibilities for students to use this cool tool!

Since most of my students are in the middle of a biography unit right now, I asked several classroom teachers if they would be willing to try this new idea with their kids.  With such wonderful staffs at both of my elementary schools, they were all "game" to give it a try!  

This is SO important! As a Library Goddess, if you are worried about trying something new because it might flop, you'll never TRULY be a Library Goddess!

Here is what we had our students do:

1. Students had already read a biography of a famous person, so they simply brought their biography books with them to Information Literacy class.  It was great to see so many books FULL of Post-It notes to show just how much kids were thinking as they were reading!

2. I gave students a sheet of paper to write on. You can download it here. Students used the time in class to write about their famous person. I told them they would only have 30 second of recording time, so they had to really edit their writing and practice their reading.

3. After practicing their readings, students used their iPads (we are a one-to-one district) to do a Google Images search for a picture of their famous person. They saved this photo to their camera roll on their iPad.

4. Students opened the ChatterKid app and uploaded the picture, drew a line where the mouth was, and recorded what they wrote!

5. Students exported the video to their camera roll, and emailed me the video.  All videos -- which export as Quick Time movies, were uploaded to library's wiki. You can see many of them here, or you can play the one below.

Kids LOVED this project! I had several kids stay in from recess so they could make some more videos "just for fun!"  

The classroom teachers and I were able to complete this project in one, 45-minute class period -- even better!

Download ChatterKid today, and see what you and YOUR students can come up with today!
     

-- Jenn McMahon, Library Goddess