Smashing Apps: Puppet Pals, Showbie and Procreate

Hello and welcome to Smashing Apps! This friendly conversation is a chance for educators to come together and share their top iPad apps and tips with each other - and the world.

Over the next thirty minutes you'll hear from three Apple Distinguished Educators: Ruth Burnett 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿, Chris Mier 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 and Anna Maria Berger 🇦🇹 who will all be sharing and discussing a favourite iPad app that they use in their classrooms. By the end of the conversation our hope is that you'll have a head full of ideas to go and take back to your own classrooms and that will positively impact your own teaching. And if anything really strikes a chord or gets you excited we'd love to hear about it - the comment section below is the perfect place to develop ideas, explore these apps and ask questions.

So sit back, get comfortable and enjoy Episode 2 of Smashing Apps. 

What follows will be a bit of a spoiler for the video above. So, proceed with caution...

Ruth shares one of her favourite classroom apps - Puppet Pals. This app lets students bring their ideas to life through the medium of a puppet show on stage, complete with a wealth of pre-made characters (and the ability to create your own too!). Ruth dives into how simple the app is to use as well as how she empowers her students to use it as a storytelling tool right across the school.

If you don't already have it, you can download Puppet Pals here.

Chris shares some of his favourite features in Showbie, the online learning platform. By taking a quick look at tools for assessment, personalised learning and resource creation, Chris shares a real insight into how Showbie is used effectively in his school.

You can download Showbie here.

In Procreate, Anna Maria shows us her process for turning drawings and artwork into beautiful stickers to use in other iPad apps. This clever technique means you can suddenly create your own resources with ease and use them in lesson plans, slide decks, as feedback and more.

You can download Procreate for iPad here.

A massive thank you to Ruth, Chris and Anna Maria for sharing their knowledge and ideas with us in this episode of Smashing Apps. We hope you've enjoyed this conversation and that you've got lots of ideas to take back to your own classroom.

Please do join me back here next month where I'll be joined by three new educators sharing three new apps. I promise you won't want to miss it!

- Jacob Woolcock