Adobe Voice captured my attention as an elegant, full-featured and simple app for students to get their ideas from their heads and into an electronic medium.
Originally I saw it as a way for kids to retell a story, but the more I looked at the possibilities, the more genre opened up to me. Memoirs, small moments, biographies, how-to, instructional texts, all about... the applications are almost literally endless.
Creations can include photos and icons that may be searched for within the app. The photo filter is minimal, but students can also add their own photos. This is what I would do with younger students, give them access to an existing folder of work, and have them create from that.
When I created a review, I worked from a script, but it was so easy to edit and change on the fly that I had no trouble fitting my words to the frame of the story. Each screen's sound is recorded individually. I found I got much better sound quality when I plugged in my headphones with their microphone attachment.
Adobe Voice provides a very interesting framework with words and phrases to help students tell their story as they go. This was distracting to me, and probably would not aid younger students, but I can see how adults and high school age kids might like it.
One of the most useful things about Adobe Voice is how it saves to the Adobe Creative Cloud. I was annoyed, but not limited by occasional crashes of my old, slow iPad, because all the things I was doing were instantly saved to the Adobe Cloud and I lost nothing. I had to create an account in order to use it, but it took literally minutes.
Teachers need to be aware of privacy ramifications of saving to Adobe's cloud. Adobe requires that teachers of students younger than 13 create accounts for their students' iPads. Older students can create their own Creative Cloud accounts; younger students will want to stick to saving to camera roll, which is thankfully now part of the app. Privacy settings indicate that Adobe does collect information while people are using the app but that the app does not retain content, so uploaded data can be washed away after it is used. You can modify some privacy settings within the app to prevent Adobe from collecting some (but apparently not all) data while the app is used.
It also seamlessly connects to Dropbox, which was a huge boon for me. I searched in advance for the photos I wanted and added them into my Dropbox folder on my computer. Teachers can connect a classroom Dropbox to students iPads and let their students draw on media right from their own collections. You can also share your creations directly on Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo and other web sites.
Here's the Adobe Voice story I created in about an hour (while writing this post): https://voice.adobe.com/a/XyAJ0/
You can also view my post about it on Twitter or on Facebook.
I would recommend this app for grades 3-12 for creating stories independently, and grades K-2 for doing it with help. A written script might make it easier for fluent readers, but everybody else might just want to talk into the microphone and see what comes out. Pair with Dropbox and an Adobe ID for easiest access, and Twitter, Facebook or Vimeo for easiest distribution.
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