Once Upon an Apple Pencil - my Americas Showcase and Resource Links

Once Upon an Apple Pencil Title Page

It was a huge thrill last week at the ADE America's Institute to share my "Once Upon an Apple Pencil" Showcase. This is a story that has been rolling around in my head for the past 4 years. I have told parts of it in previous year end reflection videos, but it was fun to weave many ideas and projects together into one story, told in "fairy tale" style. Here is a link to my Apple Pencil resource page - it contains a prerecorded (not live) version of the showcase and links to many of the student projects referenced in the showcase:

https://sites.google.com/view/creativeapptitude/apple-pencil

Here are a few little geeky tidbits of how I built the presentation:

• Most of the animated line drawings (except for the ending page) were totally traced in Keynote. Tracing is a creativity game changer!
• I wanted the title page to be a cross between a castle, a school, and an iPad. I ended up using Adobe Firefly to generate images to give me ideas. I traced and adapted this picture in Keynote make my castle/school.

illustration of a castle/school created with Adobe Firefly

• I recorded the presentation with audio in Keynote and exported it as a video. Then I pulled the video into iMovie where I did some edits to make sure it was under 3 minutes. Finally, I muted the audio track.
• I felt like the story needed some GarageBand music in the background. I used the Toy Celesta from the ToyBox with autoplay to create a theme that lasted about a minute. I repeated that theme a second time, adding some gentle percussion and some synthesized notes underneath. For the third repeat, I added a duplicate version of my original track, but using the Epic Cloud Formation to give a richer tone underneath. I added a final Toy Celesta loop and adjusted a few notes to draw the music to a conclusion. My last step was to adjust the tempo slightly so the music would be exactly 3 minutes.
• I exported the song from GarageBand and added it under video in iMovie. This movie (with no talking audio) was exported. It was set on my second slide in Keynote after my Memoji title page. So all I had to do was press the clicker once, and the entire presentation with music would play automatically! All I had to do was share the story!

I truly love my Apple Pencil, and once the students have used it, there is no going back to using fingers or styluses!