Create Your Own Motion Graphics - Adobe's App For Making Explainer Videos Is Child's Play

Adobe Voice may be the app we've been waiting for. This effortless video creator may finally fulfill the promise of tablet computing. With a simple, intuitive interface and clean, effective visuals, the Adobe Voice app allows anyone to design animated videos in minutes. It finally turns the iPad into a seamless device for content creation, not just content display or interaction.

Source: Adobe Voice

We made the video above, entitled "Why Writers Write," in only 15 minutes. We actually made it just to experiment with the themes, music, and symbols, and we now see even more potential for producing instructional clips or flipping our lessons. This week, we're even going to turn the app over to our students and let them design videos to review together for final exams.

David Pogue at Yahoo! Tech has a terrific write-up all about the possibilities for using Adobe Voice in making explainer videos. Sometimes called motion graphics or video infographics, these short animations combine icons and text to communicate a message. Often employed for online marketing purposes, explainer videos are perfect for the classroom. They blend voice, image, and language into compelling presentations for students to learn. For more information about the definition of explainer videos, check out the clips below from Column Five and Plainly Simple Studios. As Column Five notes, motion graphics like these achieve the "dual channel hypothesis," in which the brain receives information through both the eyes and ears. Learning tools that can tap into both modalities have greater effectiveness in fostering understanding.

Pogue's piece in Yahoo! Tech outlines all of the easy steps in choosing a layout, selecting a template, adding icons, pictures, or text, choosing music, and then publishing. The app automatically searches images from the public domain, and it even generates a credits page at the end. The app's tutorial can lead any user, teacher or student through the painless and exhilarating process.

With such a quick and open-ended interface, the capabilities for Adobe Voice in the classroom are incalculable. Young entrepreneurs can plan advertisements. History students can make multi-sensory travelogues. English learners can design book trailers. Scientists can explain chemical processes. Foreign language students can demonstrate spoken understanding with written text and oral comprehension.

Every video is linkable, sharable, or embeddable on any platform. Best of all, Adobe Voice is free.