Photo animation - BLABBERIZE & FOTOBABBLE

Blabberize

With Blabberize you can animate photos and drawings by adding a mouth and audio. It is fun, free online tool and can be engaging for students. How do teachers use this tool? Not only can students animate their own drawings or pictures, teachers can use the tool to animate important people or provide a memorable way to share expectations for behavior.

Blabberize Showcase: Being a Peacemaker
In a fourth grade class in St. Columbkille Partnership School, each student wrote a poem about how to be a peacemaker. In order to collaboratively share the poetry, each student chose one stanza from his/her poem to illustrate. After scanning the students' illustrations, students used Blabberize to audio record one stanza from his/her poem. Finally, the Blabberize projects were strung together in PowerPoint to create a collaborative slideshow that highlights all of the students' work.
Blabberize Showcase: Sam Houston
In another fourth grade class, students were responsible to write about historical figures in the first person. Here, a student used Blabberize to personalize her portrait of Sam Houston.
Blabberize: Tutorial
Even through Blabberize is very simple and intuitive to use, prior planning and organization will make project creation proceed smoothly.  Before you start the project, don't forget to create an outline of what will be said within each photo. Also, it is helpful to create a dedicated folder that contains all related photos. Once you sign up for an account, experiment with the shapes of the mouth and the volume of your voice to gauge how these influence the animation itself.

Fotobabble: Simple & Powerful Photo Narration

This tool is similar to Blabberize and can be accessed both online or through a free iPad app. Fotobabble allows you to easily upload photographs, record audio, and then play the narration. You can also choose themed backgrounds for your photos. With Fotobabble, you can share projects on Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or via email. The iPad version contains more options and tools. In addition to the functions available online, you can add stickers or text to an image. You can also enhance the image and draw on it! It is important to note that this tool is limited and only allows you to add a narration to a photograph unlike Blabberize, which allows you to incorporate animated mouths onto photographs.
Fotobabble Showcase: Language Instruction
Here, a Texas Spanish teacher uses Fotobabble as a tool to reenforce pronunciation and vocabulary skills. Students select a photograph and then use Fotobabble to record a narration of the photo using assigned vocabulary.  Students then email their work to their instructor as well as a peer for review.