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.