Shadow Puppet Edu

Shadow Puppet Edu is a utility app which allows students and teachers to make engaging presentations and slideshows out of photos, videos, sound clips and voiceovers. Users can start a new presentation, select their library of visual content, add animated text and background music and then record themselves going through the presentation, commenting on the images in front of them and using a range of annotative tools to give more visual feedback and a sense of interaction. Once these presentations have been made, they are saved to both the local device and to the cloud. They can also be shared via a number of services such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more, or emailed personally to teachers or other students.

When choosing images for a presentation, the user is given many options. They can choose pictures from their camera roll, photo stream or albums, or from educational resources such as NASA or the Library of Congress. They can also search the web for images from Yahoo or Flickr Creative Commons, as well as animated GIFs. In addition to photos, users can pick up to 30 seconds from a film clip to use. If letting children loose on random image searches for the web sounds a bit worrying, all searches use the strictest search filters available, and all image searching can be turned off in the app settings.

While there are no templates as such for presentations, the app does provide a number of ideas for potential uses. These take the form of sample presentations made either by students or by teachers to spice up their lessons. In addition to this, there is an ‘Ideas’ tab where users can find small sample presentations complete with tips on how best to use their resources to make such a presentation. If this isn’t enough, there is also a help center and tutorial section, which is broken down into a few short useful videos.

Even with all of these tools however, the easiest way to learn about this app is just to play with it. Without looking through any of the support material, I managed to make a reasonably interesting, if short, presentation on graph paper, set to a nice acoustic soundtrack which would leave any student in awe! Seriously though, if you have a bit more imagination than me, you can really use this app to make it a lot easier to make a simple, informative and engaging presentation. Or, if you’re a student, you can quickly show off your work, or record your progress on it, maybe even make a mini-blog. This is a great way for students to show their engagement with their learning, and more importantly show and tell their understanding of pretty much any concept.

I have no real criticisms of this app, for what it does it doesn’t have any problems. In fact, my only gripe with the app is that there is so much more it could do! In the next release, I would love to see some advanced features like collaboration and communication with other users of the app, or even the ability to write on a slide rather than a temporary annotative pointer. However, as it is now, I would still recommend this app for the odd fun lesson or for homework assignments. Good stuff!