Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week – How to Create Your Own iPad Games

tinytap_new_logoTinyTap is a fantastic free iPad app and Android app through which you can create educational games. To create a game on TinyTap you upload pictures or take new pictures and arrange them into a set. Then select each image to create questions about it. To create your question press the record button and start talking. When you have finished talking select a portion of your picture to serve as the answer. I created a small game about objects in my house. I took four pictures of things in my house. Each question asked players to identify the objects in my house. For example, when a player sees a picture of my kitchen he or she has to identify the tea pot by touching it.

The feature of TinyTap that I like the best is the Sound Board option. A Sound Board is an image or set of images to which you add your voice. To create a Sound Board you highlight elements of a picture then record yourself talking about those elements. When a student views your Sound Board he or she can tap on highlighted portions of the image to hear you talking about them. This could be a great option for creating a narration of a flowchart or a diagram.

TinyTap’s shape puzzles are similar in style to Sound Boards. Shape Puzzles allow you to add your voice to elements of a picture. In a Shape Puzzle your students have to drag pieces into place. In the video below I demonstrate how to create Shape Puzzles on TinyTap.

Here are this week’s most popular posts from FreeTech4Teachers.com:

1. 5 Tools for Creating Multimedia Quizzes – A Comparison Chart
2. Five Tools for Creating Multimedia Textbooks – A Comparison Chart
3. Nine Popular Student Response Tools Compared In One Chart
4. 5 Free iPad Apps for Drawing and Sketching Notes
5. Two Good Random Name Selection Tools
6. Build Model Atoms and More on the NOVA Elements App
7. How to Save Links In Facebook

In January I am offering an online course titled Blogging and Social Media for Teachers and School Leaders. Graduate credit is available for the course.