Toontastic - an app simply fantastic!

This week I am going to introduce a digital story telling tool for iPad users which I enjoy using: Toontastic. You can create your cartoon story and share it with family and loved ones by simply using Toontastic. Not to worry if you do not have an iPad but an iPhone. You can check Toontastic Jr. Pirates out by clicking the image! That is a lot of fun, too! 

At the beginning, you see the Story Arc screen where you decide how you will structure your story, originally divided into five scenes: Setup, Conflict, Challenge, Climax and Resolution. You can re-order the scenes or add more if you wish.








For each of the sections, you choose a setting first by either selecting from the pre-designed settings or creating (drawing, taking/using a photo) your own as you would like.

The next step is choosing your characters and props. You can choose from templates, draw your ProtoToy or use your own photo. Yes, you can be the hero/ine of this story as well!

1-2-3 Action! After deciding on the setting and characters, now it is time to animate your characters and vocalize them. Place, scale and rotate your characters as you wish and then click “Start Animation”. Move, animate and vocalize your characters, and when you are done, press “Stop Animation”.

Music is very important for realizing the emotion; therefore, you may want to choose a piece of music for your scene. Decide on the mood of the scene and level of the mood. Happy or ecstatic? Surprised or shocked? You can pick the most suitable one!





When all your scenes are finished, you give a it a title as well as adding your name. Now it is time to enjoy your story that you directed!

Toontastic promotes imagination and it can especially be used with young learners efficiently. For example, the students' task is to change the ending of a well-known story or add to it, in groups of 3 or 4. They pick their favorite story and continue the story after the “they lived happily ever after” part. First, they write their stories and to make things more cheerful they can use Toontastic! They will be using their creativity and working on their pronunciation, in addition to producing written texts. New settings can be created as the characters move in/out and travel around. They can introduce new characters; characters may get old or fat… It all depends on the creativity of the students. 

Below you can watch my sample cartoon. In order to show as much settings and characters as possible, I used irrelevant settings (I even drew one of the settings!) and characters and there is no story in general. I hope you will enjoy it!

Please let me know if you use this app in a different way, because I really like it and I want to use it productively in classrooms.

You can also watch the trailers of Toontastic and Toontastic Jr. Pirates: 

To find out more about Toontastic and actually download it with iTunes, please click on the icon below!