Buncee - Create Nice Multimedia Stories

Buncee is a nice tool that students can use to create multimedia stories. Students can use Buncee in the web browser on their computers or they can use Buncee's free iPad app to create multimedia stories.

On Buncee students can create a visual story that is unveiled as a viewer scroll across the page. Buncee stories can also be set to play automatically when they are viewed. Students create their Buncee stories by adding custom background templates to Buncee slides. To each template students can add animations, pictures, text, drawings, and videos. Buncee provides a large gallery of media that students can use in their stories. Additionally, students can import media from their computers, from YouTube, from Vimeo, from Dropbox, from SoundCloud, and from Gooru. Completed Buncee projects can be viewed online and or saved as PDFs.

Watch the video below for a short overview of how Buncee works.


Applications for Education
Buncee can be a great tool for students to use to create multimedia stories and presentations. Buncee's gallery of animations is what makes it stand-out from the crowd and appeals to elementary school students.

The World of 7 Billion - A Student Video Contest

The World of 7 Billion is a video contest designed to get students to think about issues related to population growth. The contest asks middle school and high school students to produce sixty second videos about how population growth impacts one of the following three issues; deforestation, public health, or water scarcity. Students' videos must also propose a sustainable solution to the issues that they choose to highlight in their videos. Submissions are due by February 25, 2016.

Applications for Education
Creating a video for the World of 7 Billion contest could be a good opportunity for students to incorporate and demonstrate their understanding of topics that they have studied in science and in geography. The 60 second limit on the videos will force students to be concise.

If your students have Chromebooks or Windows laptops, I recommend using WeVideo to create videos for this contest. In a Mac or iPad environment, I would use iMovie. Click here for my complete list of video creation resources.

TinyTap Introduces a New Way to Create Your Own Educational Games

TinyTap is my favorite tool for creating your own educational games. TinyTap lets you create games on your iPad and or Android tablet. Games that you create can be played by your students on their iPads, Android tablets, or in the web browser on their laptops. This week TinyTap introduced a new game format that you can use. That format is called Tap n' Type.

TinyTap's Tap n' Type format allows you to create games in which students type letters and or numbers to complete a puzzle. See Tap n' Type in action in the video below or click here to try a game.


Applications for Education
TinyTap was already my favorite tool for creating educational games for elementary and middle school students. The addition of the Tap n' Type feature just bolsters TinyTap's utility. Tap n' Type could be excellent for creating math games and word games as well as the simple identification games that TinyTap has always offered.

Get Kids Exercising With Fun Activities from Sworkit Kids

Sworkit Kids a new iOS and Android app designed to get kids moving with short, fun exercises. The app features workouts of five to thirty minutes in length (you pick the length). Each workout has a mix of fun exercises like diagonal hopping, crab walking, and hopping on one foot. You can choose exercises or let the app create a sequence of exercises for you.

Applications for Education
Sworkit Kids is obviously a great app for physical education classes, but it could be used in just about any classroom setting. Sworkit Kids could be a great app to use when you want to get your students moving for a few minutes in your classroom. After a long period of sitting, get your students stretching and moving with a five minute fun routine from Sworkit.

Click here for the Android version.
Click here for the iOS version.

DigiPuzzle - Fun Math, Spelling, and Typing Games for Kids

DigiPuzzle is a free site offering dozens of fun games for kids. The games are relatively simple exercises designed to help students practice skills in mathematics, typing, letter recognition, and spelling.

The mathematics section is the largest section of DigiPuzzle. In the math section your students will find games on counting, fractions, addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

The language section of DigiPuzzle offers games in which students practice recognizing the letters of the alphabet. In the same section you will find some basic spelling and word search games.

In the typing section of DigiPuzzle you can find six games that students can play to develop their typing skills. Three of the games include a virtual keyboard to use if a student plays the games on a table. My favorite of the typing games is photo typing puzzle. In that game students reveal a piece of a picture with each letter that they correctly type on their keyboards.

Applications for Education
None of these games are ground-breaking, but they are fun to play as a review activity. DigiPuzzle is the kind of website that you might want to keep bookmarked as a resource to use when you need a quick review activity for kids or when parents ask for an educational games website recommendation.