It is often a challenge deciding how much time should be spent teaching students how to use an app, especially when that time is at the expense of curricular time. For this reason, I always seek out the most simple, intuitive apps to use with my students, and it’s even better when those apps are free. Case in point, I am planning several short documentary activities with my students, including rock and mineral snapshot activities. I plan to have students create short videos about a particular rock or mineral sample. I will then stitch these videos together in iMovie or Final Cut to create a complete video gallery of rocks and minerals which can be used for content review. So, the question is, what app do I use for this? In a perfect world, where 54 licenses of iMove for iPad were free, I would be able to spend some time teaching basic video editing and create some fantastic products. However, in reality, I need something quick, easy, and cheap. Enter Videolicious.

Videolicious is a free, native, universal app which allows users to easily upload photos and short video clips, add music and a video narration, and have a simple, professional documentary created. This app requires no prior video editing experience, nor does it even require teacher instructions. Check out a quick overview video here. I plan on explaining the assignment and letting kids get to work…the way it’s supposed to be. I expect them to gather images from the web and take photos and video clips using the iPad cameras. They will write scripts and put it all together to create their videos, which can be easily emailed to me for final compiling and editing. I’ll be trying this out for the first time next week, so I’ll have to re-post with the results. I’m pretty psyched to try videolicious out as it may prove really useful throughout the rest of the year.

Tags: Apps, Videolicious, Science, Rocks and Minerals, Documentary, IPad Video Editing