Thursday 28 March 2013

Videoscribe

Videoscribe
By Sparkol
Free (but watermarked Videoscribe), £1.49 (video not watermarked) in iPad App Store
£1.69 Android market
Available for Android Tablets and iPad platforms
I discovered this app a few months ago before Christmas; I readily showed the app to my students as an alternative solution for designing alternative presentations to PowerPoint. This is as I am particularly keen on setting standalone presentations assessments as an alternative to the dry PowerPoint presentations.   I have used to app recently to create a promotional You Tube video, (Nortcliffe, 2013) for our Chapter, (Nortcliffe et al, 2013) in the newly launched Digital Voices book.
The app provides;
  • a library of pictures, shapes from speech bubbles to thought patterns;
  • functionality to upload your own images from Dropbox;
  • functionality to create  hand scribed animation by images and text from the library by placing in the workspace, (tip you need think about your storyboard in a procedural fashion);
  • choice of paper backgrounds, and whether the hand is left or right handed;
  • linear storyboard of your animation sequence below the workspace, in which you can change the sequence of your text and  images using drag and drop;
  • functionality in the linear storyboard to change the speed at which each of your images and text are drawn in the video;
  • functionality to  add audio overlay, however the animation is not played whilst you are audio recording so you are unable to sync your voice overlay with the animation.    

My solution to this problem is  to play the animation and use my iPhone to record my audio using Recorder Pro app.   Once I have my audio, I press record on Videoscribe and play on iPhone Recorder Pro (ensuring the volume is on max’) and stop when the audio has completed.   This is not the perfect solution, but a work around.   It should be noted the audio aspect of the app is its weakness as it doesn’t always audio record, you have to be persistent and patient, and hence it can make the production more time consuming than first perceived.

Another improvement would be to provide a choice of the hand in different nationalities, currently the provision is Caucasian, which might not go down well with diverse student populations.
Reference
Nortclife, A. (2013) iGather, [online]. Presented by Anne Nortcliffe:  From YouTube last accessed  27th March 2013 at: http://youtu.be/sv1lMUoXebk
Nortcliffe, A. Middleton, A. and Rossiter, a. (2013) “Learners take control – audio notes for promoting learner autonomy”, in Digital Voices in Section 1: Understanding the opportunity of an audio-enhanced learning environment (Ed) Andrew Middleton, MELSIG and Sheffield Hallam University, UK, 2013

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