Mar 13 2008
Kerpoof
Yes - this is a kid friendly site despite the name sounding as if it might not be!
It is great fun and would be a great way to encourage writing for children. You can make pictures and cards by choosing a background and dragging on characters which you can resize, rotate and add speech bubbles to.
You can also put backgrounds with scenes on them together in a sequence and make a storybook in this way. When making a movie, each character you add has a number of actions that you can programme them to do. You take one of the available actions and drag it up into the timeline. You can continue building up a sequence of these actions with a range of characters. You can also add special effects. This is great fun and takes perseverance as well. It could be considered a kids way to program (it reminds me of Alice but at a lower level). Like the storybook option, you can add more scenes to your movie to create a longer story.
To get the content off the site, you can print but you can only view the video online.
This is a great tool. You could use it to create the beginning of a story and print it and then children write the middle and ending. This is just one idea - I’m sure you could think of many other uses.
3 responses so far
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HI
Thanks for reminding me of Kerpoof.
I had bookmarked it and then forgotten about it. I was hoping to show it to some of my students.
Kevin
I also loved using Kerpoof…however, some kids ruined it by posting inappropriate messages. We spent the morning changing passwords and having a “talk.” For the rest of this year, I think they will use it at home, only!
Follow-up Post:
Kerpoof contacted me and deleted the board and made some other changes to help stop this from happening again. I was very pleased with their prompt action!