10 Best Animation Apps to use in the Classroom and at home

Animation Kit is an easy to use animation app for creating exciting animation sequences using drawings, photos, shapes, and text. This animation app has ready-made templates such as school, beach, forest, town, Summer and ocean floor. The application is free but has some restrictions on the additional templates. Animation Kit enables you to create beautiful animations on your iPad. 

This app encompasses all the traditional tools you would expect from a high-quality drawing animation app such as brushes, paint palettes, shapes, combining video and photos, adding music, scale, rotate, colour adjustment and so much more. You can make beautiful animations on your iPad in just a few steps. Once you're finished, you can export your animation to a variety of formats, including GIF, MP4, and PNG. 

Using the timeline at the bottom of the screen the user can adjust the frame to the starting and finishing positions and move the shape to animate it. Even the youngest users can learn to use the animation feature quickly and easily, without any help from parents or teachers. The feature is so intuitive that even children can master it in a short amount of time. What we love about Animation Kit is the simplicity and ease at which a complex animation can be created in a short space of time making it one of the best animation app. This app is available only on the App Store for iPad.

Pros

• Connect with young artists worldwide
• Showcase your animations to the world

Cons

• Available only on iOS devices

Price: Free (With in-app purchasing options) 

Devices: iPhone, iPad

Toontastic is a 3D animation video-making app for Android users used in thousands of schools around the world that enables kids to draw, animate, and share their cartoons. A fantastic digital storytelling tool that empowers kids to organize ideas, transforming them into entertaining animated cartoons.

The app includes a range of fun effects and character animations that can be added to bring life to a cartoon. The app includes a wide range of characters, backgrounds, and props to choose from, giving users a lot of options for creating their cartoons. It's visually appealing, has great in-app support and sharing features, and relies on self-created animation and narration to tell stories. Toontastic provides a stunningly easy way by how it makes the complicated process of creating an animated short movie so simple making it one of the best animation apps. 

While Toontastic was not specifically designed for schools, we have heard from a lot of educators over the years that they love how this animation app sparks their students’ imaginations and uses the Story Arc to help frame their writing. Students use the app for creating everything from book reports to news broadcasts and foreign language skills. This app is compatible with Android platforms.

Pros

• Teaches invaluable lessons about storytelling
• Great app for both school as well as home settings

Cons

• Limited number of objects to interact with

Price: Free 

Devices: Android

Tellagami is a free animation app for students to learn by creating. Teachers and students can use Tellagami to create book reports, solve math problems and recite lessons. The possibilities are endless! 

Tellagami is an animation app that lets kids create their animated characters that speak typed or recorded audio. Kids can also choose your character's skin tone, mood, placement and lots of other options. Tellagami might help them explain a concept or tell a story in a new way. Kids can learn to use an animated character to speak text that tells a story, gives a presentation, or delivers another important message. Kids can place a custom character on a custom background and use this imagined space as the setting for a class presentation, a digital postcard, or another spoken message up to 30 seconds long. 

Tellagami Edu is a paid version of the Tellagami app loaded with features that allow classrooms to use the app without in-app purchases. The biggest learning potential for Tellagami might be for students who struggle with social skills.

Pros

• Simple to use
• Record your voice and share it via text or email

Cons

• Limited support
• Limited functionalities

Price: Free (With in-app purchasing options) 

Devices: iPhone, iPad

Animoto is one of the best animation apps for iPad and one of the easy slideshow maker that allows you to create beautiful videos set to music in minutes. It allows you to create a video sharing a story that educates, inspires, entertains, or engages your audience.

Animoto lets you quickly and easily combine text, images, and videos into beautiful videos. Students learn how to create video slideshows by organizing multimedia into creative digital storytelling. This free animation app offers over 50 different video styles, hundreds of songs in a built-in music library and the ability to share via popular social media platforms.

You can upload photos or video clips from your computer or import them from various other sites like Facebook, Instagram or Dropbox to make a beautiful video or animation from photos or videos. Animoto also has a selection of stock photos and video clips that you can browse to add some extra visuals to your video.

Make eye-catching school promotional videos with ease. Quickly create video newsletters, fundraise and recruit with private school marketing videos, and add technology to the classroom with our video maker for teachers, administrators, and students. 

Pros

• No experience in animation necessary
• Stock images and Music library makes it easy

Cons

• Placement of text on videos is limited
• Watermark appears on free version

Price: You can access the basic features for free. Premium subscriptions are available at various price points, ranging from $9 to $45 per month.

Devices: iPhone, iPad

FlipaClip is an animation maker app that replicates and improves upon traditional flipbook-style animation. FlipaClip is one of the best free animation apps that helps you create cartoon animations.

Combining simple yet interesting drawing tools with frame control, it enables the production of impressive animations. With a creative tool such as FlipaClip, there are two broad areas where it may be useful in the classroom: art lessons covering animation and other subject lessons using a creative means by which to show and record knowledge. The app also comes with several drawing tools such as brush, eraser and so on. This free animation app gives you the chance of creating your very own video with the use of sketching and imaginations. FlipaClip helps you to make animations on your iPhone easily.

Pros

• Very intuitive and straightforward
• Short animations can be created quickly
• Lots of options for free users

Cons

• Few random bugs/freezes

Price: Free (With in-app purchasing options) 

Devices: iPhone, iPad, Android

Puppet Pals HD is an easy to use cartoon creator app that allows you to create your animations using a variety of themes and characters. Puppet Pals HD allows you to create an endless array of animations and can be used in most lessons. The app can help to develop children's imagination skills as well as teaching them how to sequence, explore narrative, character, plot, voice projection, expression and unleash their creative skills. The only real limitation is the users' imagination. 

It is a free animation apps for kids who can learn about digital storytelling using Puppet Pals HD. It is a fun, creative way to help kids learn thematic storytelling.

Price: Free

Devices: iPhone, iPad

Animation Desk is a good animation app that lets you draw and animate at the same time. This app allows you to easily create animations, draw cartoons, or do some sketching. Its main features include a friendly and gorgeous user interface with realistic scenes for your animation creating. Animation Desk makes it simple for you to import your videos or photos to create animations and spice them up in so many ways. Animation Desk is is counted amongst the best animation app for iPad.

With this app, you can create and blend many levels of animation in one scene. It also has a variety of painting tools with pressure sensitivity and includes pencil, crayon, fountain pen, brushes and eraser. It also has over a hundred vivid colors for you to choose from to give your creations life and it lets you adjust the size and opacity of your brushes.

Animation Desk is available for Android and iOS but this app is a perfect choice if you like to create animations by drawing on your iPad using the Apple Pencil. You can download it for free through the Google Play Store or the iTunes App Store. Animation Desk is one of the best tools for animators. Now, creating an animation on your iPad or iPhone is easy with this animation creator app. 

Pros

• Guides through the basic animation process
• Powerful animation tools
• Share animation to Facebook and YouTube

Cons

• Few audio editing options
• Some users find tool a bit unstable

Price: Free (With in-app purchasing options) 

Devices: iPhone, iPad, Android

Despite being relatively simple to use, Adobe Animate sure does have a lot to offer animators. Adobe Animate is capable of creating animations for video games, television shows, websites, applications, and several other animation platforms.

The interface is clean and recognisable, especially if you're already familiar with other Adobe products. And the ability to quickly share and publish your work to social media sites like YouTube and Twitter makes it easy to get your animations online.

When it comes to vector-based animation software that is great for beginners yet convenient for cross-platform projects, Adobe Animate is the best animation software to pick. This program has raster support, audio-video embedding, rich text, and even action 3.0 scripting. 

Animate has a wide range of export formats, like SVG, HTML5, SWF, Adobe Air, and WEBGL, and can also be extended to Android, Windows, macOS, and iOS operating systems.

Pros

• Packed with professional-level features
• Plethora of introductory tutorials

Cons

• Learning how to use this software isn’t easy, so it’s not ideal for beginners in animation

Price: Free (With in-app purchasing options) 

Devices: iPhone, iPad

With Stop Motion Studio, you can create professional animations in no time, using their nice and simple interface. This app uses a storyboard interface for animation creation, which shows all of the frames in sequence. With this animation app, its easier to create video animations and GIFs. 

Perhaps one of the coolest features of this free animation app is the retroscoping effect which lets you import your own video clips and then draw over them! The app has advanced features like the full HD quality output, green light, themes, titles, and other editing tools. You can even use a remote cam to take your shots and is supported through in-app purchases. This app has basic video editing tools such as cut, delete, copy, paste, and other modes such as overlay, grid, frame-in-frame, and many more.

This app is available through the Google Play Store or the iTunes App Store. 

Pros

• Suitable for beginners as it includes tutorials
• Green screen for changing and editing the background
• Shareable over YouTube or can be saved as animated GIF

Cons

• Time consuming
• Lack of premade designs and templates

Price: Free trial available; $4.99 one-time payment

Devices: iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows, Chromebook

Stick Nodes is a popular stickman animation maker app for Android and iOS users. The Stick Nodes app allows users to animate stick figures and really bring them to life. In addition, to stick figures, you can now import and animate images.

You'll be creating your own animated .gif and make use of the many creative tools and features. Users are given all kinds of segment shapes which means you can get creative and unique with your figures. You can easily add sound effects using sound effect apps to the frames of your animations, and make animated videos.

You can now have as many nodes as you want on each frame of your animation. This gives you more control over the look and feel of your animations.

Pros

• Active community of animators
• Import and animate images
• Export it as animated GIFs or MP4 videos

Cons

• Lack of characters and backgrounds
• Bugs in saving the animations

Price: Free

Devices: iPhone, iPad, Android