Friday, August 16, 2013

Fotobabble - easy peasy image 'voice over' tool

Just found Fotobabble and it's a fun, easy to use tool that enables many types of student learning. Low 'start up' time - simply select a user name, add a password and valid email address, and I was ready to go. Alas, no Google sign in, but it was easy anyway...

I entered a url for an image, to which I then wanted to add a voice-over. Fotobabble also allows image uploads from the desktop. I added a little 'background' spruce it up, and the image was all set.

Here's the page for adding a voice-over after completing the image upload.


After fiddling a bit with the flash settings to get my external microphone working right (could have been me having the issue...), fotobabble is a snap to use. I clicked the "Record" button, provided some pithy information, and then pressed Stop. I listened to my recording, re-recorded once because I didn't like it, then clicked Save. All done!

I was then able to choose from several sharing options located right on that page. EASY!

There's also an iOS app (cool!), but, alas, apparently no Android counterpart (sigh...).

Here's the end result. I used the HTML5 version, which means 'no flash required'....nice.




Fotobabble provides an easy way to take an image (hopefully, one the student or teacher has taken themselves...) and then voice-over a description, explanation, analysis, compare and contrast or just about any level of Blooms Taxonomy one would want.

I highly recommend you give fotobabble a try. The tool also supports many of Common Core's goals of students growing research, creativity, collaboration, etc. skills.

3 comments:

rbandfield said...

I like the idea but as a elementary school teacher this site like so many others has an under 13 clause - "Use by Children The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act severely restricts what information may permissibly be collected from children under the age of 13 years. For this reason, children under the age of 13 years are prohibited from using the Fotobabble service. You may not provide your username or password to any child under the age of 13 years."

I really wish that someone would create great sites with school children in mind.

Michael at QuizBean said...

What a great idea! There are so many applications for Fotobabble. I can see it being used in art history courses to talk about artists or in business class to talk about social media problems. Thanks for sharing!

gujjar g said...

Thank you for share this informative post.