Educreations....closer to flipping that classroom?

I have found an app that allows me to create videos that my students can watch anywhere! It is called Educreations and is FREE!! Educreations is a recordable interactive whiteboard that captures your voice and handwriting to produce amazing video lessons that you can share online. Students and colleagues can replay your lessons in any web browser, or from within the Educreations app on their iPads or phones. Educreations has allowed me to post quick review videos on my website for students who have either missed class, or need some extra support. These videos have been met with lots of praise from both parents and students themselves! Parents like that students can access the daily notes if they are absent from class, which allows students to stay current on the materials learned in class. Students have said that they like being about to go back through the new material at their own pace, and some have used the notes for test prep. In my classroom, I don't always use a direct method of teaching, especially when it comes to teaching grammar. The videos I make as more of that traditional direct instruction, more of the nuts and bolts of the grammar or concept we are learning. This also helps for students who need that direct instruction, a way to help various learning styles. Educreation videos are easy to make, and even easier to post. From start to finish, I can create a five minute instructional video and post it on my website in roughly six minutes! Not bad!! In the future, I se using this app to allow my students to do some story telling, or perhaps even some oral testing. Here is a link to some of the videos I have posted on my website: https://sites.google.com/a/isd77.k12.mn.us/west-deutsch-1/daily-notes Enjoy!!

Starting Out...

I WON!! I WON!! I WON!! I seriously have never won anything in my life!! So, you can imagine my surprise when I found out that I was a winner in the District 77 iPad drawing this fall! I just could not believe it! Upon receiving my new iPad, I of course had to go out and buy a cute cover and fun accessories!! The best of which I found was the Adonit Jot Pro Stylus Pen for iPad. It is probably the best stylus out there! It is, however, very pricy (around $30), but I have found it to be a better feel than a regular rubber-end stylus and it makes writing on the iPad much faster and smoother, more like writing with a real pen or pencil.

After the excitement wore off, and I had purchased all my iPad "goodies", I was faced with the task of incorporating my new iPad into my classroom. I found many Apps that I thought were cool and helpful, however the more that I thought about this integration, the more I wished that I had won a full classroom set.... as many of the Apps that I have found would be cool to do with an entire class of iPads. Today, for my first post I will tell you about the App that has really helped me in my classroom: Air Sketch. Air Sketch has both a free and a paid version of this App. I tried out the free version first and decided right away to pay for the App. The App cost around $8 and allows users to project PDF documents (such as exported PowerPoint or Keynote decks) to a computer on the same local network, then annotate them in real time. For me this was great, because I live in a classroom with a broken smart board, and cannot write on my smart board. This App allowed me to sit in the back of the classroom and write notes for the students. I can also pass the iPad around the room and have the students write answers on it. It has been a great asset to my classroom. Air Sketch is easy to use,all you have to do fire up Air Sketch on the iPad and open the specified URL from any HTML-5 compatible browser on the local network. Your photos and drawings show up natively in the browser. There's no proprietary client software to install, or services to subscribe to. Hope this gives you something to think about and play with for the time being! I will write again soon!!