#educreations

Educreations is an iPad app and a website that teachers and students can use for presentations. 

Here’s a scenario: Let’s say you have a student whose absent for a whole week due to an injury/illness/other excused absence. It’s the end of the unit. This student may not always be good at getting make up work. See previous experience where they (we are keeping these pronouns non-gender specific to keep the student anonymous rather than to indicate a trans identity) have never emailed you for make up work. You, being the dedicated teacher you are, do not want this student to fall behind. There is no reason for their grade to be any lower and you would like to prevent that from happening. Here’s where educreations comes in. You can utilize this app to present information from class and have it record your voice so said student doesn’t fall behind. 

Teachers who are interested in using a flipped classroom (and have students with an appropriate level of access to technology) can use this app to lecture, teach, or introduce assignments. The link above is my own example introducing a visual essay assignment to students. 

This app is especially useful for English teachers because of both the way students learn and because students often present information or arguments in English class. My students had the option to use this app to present their visual essays. I also intend to use this app for days when many students will be absent for field trips or other school related activities and their peers can teach their classmates the lesson or relate parts of the story covered in class that day. Students learning English (ESL/ELL) can also use this to practice their English and presentation skills in groups. Apps like this can promote student leadership in class without putting shy students completely on the spot. It can also let a student practice oratory skills without the pressure of presenting in front of the whole class. 

Educreations can be one of those apps that a teacher decides to use for themselves or use to help a class teach each other. Either way its a great start to presenting that gives students another way of showing off their English skills for their classmates! 

The educreations application that can be installed on your ipad and mirrored to a device in your classroom works very well and is easy to use.  The application allows you to add pictures or videos as well as being able to type/write directly on your ipad.  What you want the students to see is then projected on the tv.

I used this in my classroom where I have an apple tv.  I took a snapshot of the math sheet my students were doing in class.  I was able to show the same sheet AND write on the sheet via my ipad.  It is a great tool because you can show exactly what the students are working on.  It is very similar of how the overhead projector use to work but instead of making the “over head sheets” it is all digitally done.

One new tool within this application that I loved was when doing a lesson on money I was able to search and find pictures that are already on the app that represented the coins I needed. In language arts I typed the sentences I needed to review on the screen which was then shown to the class.  I was able to classify the sentences as the students worked on them.  It was very beneficial for students to follow what we were doing and be able to write/erase directly on the ipad to add to what they are learning.