Kerpoof

Kerpoof allows you to easily create pictures, stories, and animated movies. Pictures can be created by first selecting a scene from a variety of different back-drops, and then dragging and dropping objects (thousands of which are available) onto the 3D scene. Stories can be created by linking multiple scenes together and adding text.

Kerpoof’s animation interface has been designed to introduce basic concepts to children in a fun context, which makes it very easy to get started but still provides flexibility and control. A rich character library is provided, with each character having numerous, built-in animated actions, many of them humorous. By mixing and matching the built-in animations with custom scripts and dialog, animated movies are easily created. More advanced capabilities allow students to turn their movies into interactive stories or adventure-style games. Watch the CEO of Kerpoof introduce the software to an audience.

Students can create their own avatars and join groups with other Kerpoof users. Since the site wants to encourage only users who already know each other to interact online, each group requires a name and password to join. Once several students are in the same group, they can send messages to each other, share their Kerpoof creations, and do other things like gift clip art objects.

The picture creation tool also allows students to work on pictures at the same time. Picture edits update every user’s view instantly, allowing students to make changes together while they chat. See the Kerpoof tutorials to get a better idea of how students can interact with the software to make an animated movie or a drawing.

Kerpoof would be a useful tool at many levels – from pre-school to late primary. It can be used to support many cross-curricular activities, and would support literacy and numeracy particularly well. It is simple to use, and extremely motivating as a learning tool, and would rival many other software tools that are pay-to-use.

English-language learners would be well supported in using this tool, and also learners of other languages - the default language for the program interface is English, but users can also choose to see it in a choice of 6 other languages, including Spanish, German, Greek and Italian. Unfortunately this does not change the storylines that are in English, but there is enough in the program to benefit second-language learners, as most of the creative input is done by the student.

Look at the Kerpoof website for some classroom ideas.

Kerpoof works in a web browser, so there's no software to download.

Kerpoof Teacher Accounts are free and will allow you to access classroom administration tools to easily create accounts for an entire class of students. They will also allow you to control access to collaboration features like group galleries, message boards, chat and buddy drawing. There are several other benefits of having a teacher account, such as being able to reset forgotten student passwords and to monitor student activity and delete inappropriate student messages, etc.

You can try out Kerpoof without having to log-in, but this gives you restricted features and you cannot save your work.

Note that even though the Kerpoof website is moderated, the quality of the publicly available content still depends on the vigilance of the moderators, and there is no guarantee that all public content is appropriate. Teachers should always check content themselves before allowing the students to use it.