Toontastic!

Heard of it?

It's a cool puppet show app.  

Aside from the fact that it comes with super cool characters, backgrounds, and the ability to make your own- it's setup to teach the Story Arc to your students.  Definitely click the picture above to go to their website to see some videos of it in action. What did I use it for this year?  I had my kids use it to do their Extreme Weather reports.  I had six groups, three of them chose to use Toontastic for their report.  They each chose a reporter character, use the camera tool to take a picture of the storm they were reporting on, and went from there. With an upgrade, you can publish your Toontastic videos to youtube.  So here is one of my groups:
You can hear my kids in the background- yeah.  At the time I thought they were absolutely screaming- but at least it doesn't sound too bad picked up by the mic.  They picked their background music as well.  They did their own research and then wrote out what they wanted to say.  These groups worked out somewhat better than my "live action" reporters, as they all became camera shy.  These folks knew they weren't being filmed, so they weren't nervous.  They didn't think much about moving their characters around, but it was our first try with the app.
It's simple to use and talks the kids through each step.  My three year old even has played around with toontastic and had many, many dinosaurs and robots chasing fire engines.
They offer a free trial for Teachers, and have a cheap School pack for you to show your ITRT.  I didn't know about that at first, and had bought it for my own personal use and the upgrade pack to go with.  I'm still hugely satisfied with it.
It looks like they've set up a very cool Project Penpal where you can share cartoons with a compatible classroom elsewhere.  Something I will definitely look into doing next year! Has anyone else tried this app?  Any second graders out there wanting to give a penpal project a go next year?  Or even try something real quick at the end of this one?  Let me know!