My post about alternatives to YouTube's video editor has sparked a lot of questions from readers in the last 24 hours. No question has been asked more than, "can my students who are under 13 use it?" Adobe addressed this question in their free Adobe Spark Edu Guide. You can get the guide here.
Here's how the question of use by students under age 13 is answered on page 7 of the Adobe Spark Edu Guide:
Adobe Spark requires an account and login. Logins are used to sync content
across devices as well as to backup content to our cloud storage. Children under
the age of 13 are not allowed to create their own Adobe ID and so they will
need to sign in with an account created by and supervised by a teacher or
parent. Sign in with social media accounts is also supported.
A couple of years ago Google launched the Cardboard Camera app for capturing your own virtual reality panoramas. At the time that it was launched it was only available on the Android platform and it didn't include a mechanism for sharing your panoramas with others. Both of those things have since changed. You can now use the Cardboard Camera app on iPhones and on Android phones. You can now share your virtual reality panoramas with others through email and social media. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to use the Cardboard Camera to capture and share virtual reality panoramas.
Applications for Education
The Cardboard Camera app isn't as robust as some other virtual reality creation tools, but it is more than adequate for capturing a simple panorama of a local landmark. I've seen a few teachers and their students use the Cardboard Camera app to create virtual reality imagery of local landmarks including interesting geological features near them.
Last week I wrote about a free animation tool called Flip Anim. In that post I mentioned using animated GIFs of math problems or to animate simple scenes from a story. A reader sent me a follow-up question asking about how to keep track of each part of the animation. So to answer that question, I created the following short video about how to create animated GIFs by using Flip Anim.
