Thursday, August 22, 2013

Touchcast Video App for iPad

We hope the school year is off to a successful start!  Our students are back this week (hence the lack of posts in recent days), and we are excited to be back in our classrooms with them.  The new school year gives us an opportunity to try new tools, and I already found a new favorite – Touchcast for iPad.

Touchcast allows the user to produce professional quality videos and share them with a public audience.  I use it to produce daily announcements to send out to our classrooms each morning.  Because I use the “Latest News” template, my video looks a slick newscast with a banner and a CNN news crawl.  Once recorded, I simply email the link to my teachers (or post on social media if I chose).

V-Apps can be added into the video that will allow the user to pull in maps, videos, images and links.  Your viewers can then touch the image to open a link, refresh a Twitter feed, manipulate a map, play a video or annotate a document.  Its interactive features can be very engaging for your students who are ready to produce work that bring their learning to the transformative levels. Think how your students can use Touchcast in your classroom. It’s ideal for flipped and peer teaching opportunities as well. 

On the Touchcast site users will find rules as to what cannot be posted, so you have some assurance that your students will not view explicit material as they use the site. As always, copyright regulations apply.  Use caution though, it is not COPPA compliant.  It is free and available through iTunes.  An Android release is in the works, watch for release information.

Please share with us how you use video production in your classrooms!

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