Graphic Design Apps for Teacher

Graphic design for teachers, or at least those of us not blessed with artistic talents used to be limited to choosing Comic Sans or Times New Roman for worksheets. Now thanks to the wonders of modern technology we can use a range of tools to create engaging and interesting visuals.

Where once a hand drawn map on an OHP was our limit we can now build in great visuals to anything. In this post I am going to outline my current favourites. I have used these to create videos for both lessons and training as well as this blog and to add interest to tweets. I have chosen these because they don’t take long to master. I’m talking minutes here.

It is easy to dismiss these as gimmicks but hold on! I need to hook my student’s interest If I can build in a quick James Bond reference to gain a students attention I will unashamedly do so. If I need to wake people up with a mildly amusing video about health and safety during a training session I will stoop to that level.

This is not a sponsored post – I genuinely love using these apps. Here they are all installed and all free, I haven’t needed to buy any of the IAPs so far. These are all for iOS.

Splice

Splice is an app owned by go-pro but I haven’t got one. Its a great little video editor allowing you to stitch together video clips and images very quickly and simply. You can add a range of supplied audio or mp3s as well as a narration. I used it to make a quick promo video for the Wellbeing curriculum blog post

Typorama

This is THE app for making visuals, quotes, backgrounds tweets social media headers. We used it to make posters of the school mission statement. I think at least 60% of the visuals on this blog use typorama. It is awesome and simple. Choose a size, choose an image, and add text over the top. Tinker with shadows, fonts, angle of text. To add additional text you just need to save then press re-use to add another line. I wrote a post all about it that at least thee people have read.

Videorama

You guessed it this is the video version of Typorama. it allows you to stitch together images. Is a bit more fun than Splice -You can add effects and audio but some require in app purchases it also has a watermark. No issues with exporting. I forgot to add an FX for the test video.

Yammo

I only found this two days ago, Yammo is a fun app for creating short video clips of 4 seconds that you can use for anything really. Animated adverts. Annoying your friends. The small size means they would be great for storytelling or boosting the interest level of lessons. basically you add text, and little pictures called yammojis to an image. The two best bits are the option to add a bit of another image and the fact that you can animate anything you add. So far I have used it to amuse my daughter over half term.

Tellagami

If you have ever sat through training and wished the trainer would stop talking. Or delivered training and thought “I need to have a drink and a lie down” then you need Tellagami. Exporting a Tellagami would be great to get a cover teacher to play, or if you have to host assembly make one then go and do some marking while the school watches it.

The free version is limited to one lady and one chap and 30 seconds. You just choose a background and narrate a message then export. The app syncs the animation to the avatars movements. Genius.

Seedling Comic Studio.

Now this is fun and simple, all you really need are some pictures see below I have added James Bond into a scene. You can easily cut out people and objects from images to insert then add the usual comic bubbles and a few props over the top. Seedling Comic Studio is free and very simple. You could As you can see from the images on this post I have appsmashed a number of these together to create visuals.

Comic studio does require some mental arithmetic before it lets you save however.