This is app has quickly become a big favourite, not just with learners, but also with teachers. It works very well in an EYFS context as staff can quickly combine/mash up themes and include the children presenting.

Recently whilst visiting a school in Staffordshire, I was given about 90 seconds to prepare for some work with Reception teachers. The children had been learning about sharks teeth. So I showed staff how to create a back drop and an overlay in Puppet Pals. This then created a more immersive video space for the children to show and tell what they had discovered about sharks teeth! 

 Puppet pals, Doink Green Screen and iMovie are tools that all teachers can become skilled in very quickly. The camera’s on the current iPad Airs are better than most school digital cameras. As a result, the quality with the green screen app is very high, even with temporary sugar paper as a green screen. 

 So here’s one way to use that luxurious additional track in Doink’s Green Screen as an “overlay”. Here’s an example.

The other really useful tip is the ability to resize the video by pinching and spreading on the video track. For example, students could be made to be very small in front of a volcano or massive giants in story telling project.

So here we are using Puppet Pals to create the overlay. If you can find transparent PNG files they will be pre “cut out”.
otherwise the images can be a bit rough at the edges (literally)!

A simple green rectangle will work as the green screen. Here you can see it selected in Puppet Pals.

Record your action. Remember that a double tap on the character will change it’s direction. Pinching and spreading will zoom out (shrink) Zoom in (enlarge) the character.

Export your Puppet Pals projects to the camera roll and then add to the first track in Doink Green Screen.

Here we can see  the overlay imported into the top video layer. It will appear in front of the children presenting (the middle layer) and the green screen image in the background (the bottom layer). Before recording the children, explore pinching and spreading the overlay in terms of its position and size.
When you have things in place, export to the camera roll and edit in iMovie.

A helpful tip in iMovie, is to use the zoom in option if the edges of the green screen are showing. In this example, you can see a break in the green screen in the top left of the image. To zoom in and effectively crop the video image, select the video clip by tapping it in the timeline and you will see the “magnifying glass” icon in the bottom right of the screen. You can now use a pinch/spread gesture to zoom in or out. This enables you to crop into the image.

Before:

and then after zooming in:

 

 

Obviously, this process is aimed at teachers and support staff, but older children can use this workflow and plan really exciting projects.