4.8
Where to Buy

TeleStory App Review

App Info

Price: Free

Overview

TeleStory taps users’ creativity as they create and produce television shows. With fun sound effects, theme music, and on-screen costumes, the possibilities for fun are limitless. Once the show is made, it can be viewed or saved on the device’s camera roll for later sharing and viewing.

Features include:

  • Four themes for shows
  • Over 30 scenes to mix and match
  • Write-your-own scenes
  • Digital costumes using face tracking
  • Animated special effects

Quality

TeleStory is a high-quality app that will really tap into users’ creative juices. The app is intuitive to use and has a wide array of elements to choose when creating new shows.  The face tracking feature places costumes on the user, so it takes a bit of getting used to because the digital hats, features and other props follow the central figure around the screen and sometimes lag behind just a bit as the tablet responds to movement.  Developers did a great job of creating the scenes, music and effects for the four themes provided, and also remembered to leave room for lots of creativity and even “blank” scenes and shots.

Education

It’s tough to pack much more creativity into an app than this one has.  Kids are usually fascinated with video, but this app encourages them to plan their shows carefully and gives opportunity to write the script, choose the sound effects and special effects, and even rehearse before recording.

There are four themes to choose from: TV news show, spy thriller, rock star, and action/adventure.  Once the theme is chosen, users can put together scenes by creating scripts, choosing sound effects and onscreen animations, and dressing themselves in digital costumes.  The costumes utilize the camera’s face tracking feature to show the digital decorations that move with the person’s face.  Young directors can string multiple scenes together to create entire shows, then watch them like movies or send them to the device’s camera roll to share in other ways.

Educationally speaking, this app makes a great reason to apply school skills to fun, every day activities.  The planning, reading, writing and thinking required to create movies of any length will really help kids maintain their focus on a larger project.

Entertainment

Recording yourself has an appeal all its own-what parent hasn’t seen their children grab the video or sound recorder and put on a skit or mock up an interview.  TeleStory adds fun to these intrinsically entertaining activities by adding great theme music, interesting animations and sound effects (who doesn’t love a good “POW” when hitting the bad guy in a spy show?), and great digital hats and costumes.  Kids will enjoy TeleStory for hours and they will play with it again and again.

Value

TeleStory is a great value-it’s FREE!  You’ll have to look a long way to find a more exciting way to occupy kids and get their brains moving.  Your kids are quite likely to leave the real TV or computer in favor of creating their very own shows, and it can be a true family event to view the finished products once they are done.  The shows can even be family projects: collaborations not only bring people closer; they also offer opportunities for modeling important attitudes and skills that you want the children in your life to emulate.

Child Friendliness

This app falls down just a little bit in the Child-Friendly category.  The parents’ area is not protected, and it does contain one live email link that will take kids into your email client.  It was surprising to find it live; there are numerous email and internet links, and developers seem to have taken great pains to make the others non-clickable.  It seems like this one live one sort of slipped through by accident, but it is there, and parents do need to be aware of it.

  • NO social media
  • NO in-app purchase
  • NO 3rd party ads
  • YES unprotected parent area containing a live email link
  • YES “rate app” pop-up (unprotected)
TeleStory
TeleStory
TeleStory will keep kids of nearly any age entertained for hours on end as they take on the challenges of writing, directing and filming shows that will fire up their imaginations.
Quality
Education
Entertainment
Value
Child Friendly
4.8
Where to Buy