Armistice App-Smash

I thought long and hard about when would be best to share this on the blog, normally I would share something like this in the run up to something. I am usually keen to do this in the run up to a celebration day or religious festival so that class teachers have enough time to have a go at doing it in their class. However, given the nature of this post – it just didn’t seem right. I apologise if you’re reading this and you would have liked to have done this with your class but as I said it didn’t seem right to promote myself on the lead up to armistice, it didn’t feel like the decent thing to do. I hope I can make amends by adding some ideas at the end of the post on how you could apply this to other topics you might be covering.

I was first shown a version of this by the fantastic Martin Bailey who is a good friend of mine and my guru when it comes to app smashing, I haven’t used the exact same apps as Martin, but I have gone for a similar effect; I definitely recommend having a look at what he has done with this appsmash project.

The idea behind this is simple, an interesting picture is behind with an image in front, the background image is ‘greyed out’ and the foreground image is manipulated to ‘pop’ I did this with a terrific app called Pixomatic. This is a good opportunity to revise creative commons and copyright and explain which images are appropriate to take. Also, I like to highlight what would be a good image to save at this point, what would be appropriate or interesting and make our audience think.

Following this a word cloud about the subject is added, I made the word clouds on an app called Word Cloud by ABCya but there are loads to choose from, Wordsalad will even import its text from Wikipedia for ease. At this point I added the pictures together using Pic Collage, overlapping the word cloud on top of the Poppy Picture. The final step is to use Prisma, a photo editing app, to add a filter to the image, which is then saved to the gallery and can be shared or printed off.

As I have said this could be easily adapted to suit a range of PHSE topics, science units or even history and geography topics, all it would take is changing the images and the word cloud. That’s what makes this such a fun app smash, it’s so versatile! Once you have made this with your class trust me your mind starts racing with how this technique could be used again. I even asked the class some scenarios of how it could be used and I must admit… I was impressed!