Multiply Yourself! {An App Idea}

Hello everyone! I'm Christy from Teaching Tales Along the Yellow Brick Road, a second year teacher from the great state of Kansas. I teach in a 1:1 iPad school, so I am constinently trying to figure out ways to implement this wonderful technology. I am so excited to be a part of this blogging group. I hope you are enjoying all of the ideas each day; I know that I am! 

Do you ever have days where you wish there were more copies of yourself?

{Ha, we're teachers... I'm sure we've all wished for an extra set of hands at some point!}

I'm here to help you out a bit.

Enter... Educreations.

With this app, as the teacher, I can create a presentation, but not just any ordinary presentation. The app takes not only a video of what is done on the screen, but also records my voice. (The only bummer being that there isn't an undo button. I've learned to hit the pause button between thoughts, so that I make fewer mistakes in my recordings).

Students create accounts with either a username or email address; I love that student's don't have to have an email address, and that I can hand out the usernames I'd like my students to have. The first time students login to Educreations, there is a one-time password to join my class. {The password is given to you, the teacher, when you set up your videos to share with students.} From there, students can view any videos I've shared with them! It truly is an easy process; hopefully through my description I haven't discouraged you to play around!

Now to the fun part... seeing this app in action!

Super easy interface. Love it.

With this app, as a teacher, I can create a presentation. The app takes not only a video of what is done on the screen, but also records my voice. (Only bummer is there isn't an undo with voice recording...I've learned to hit pause between thoughts, so that I make fewer mistakes.) Students create accounts with username or email address as an elementary school teacher, I love that the student's don't have to have an email. Once they login to www.educreations.com from Safari, they can watch any video that I assign to their class. (They have to have a one-time password to join a class.) Really, this is simpler than I'm making it sound, I just want to make sure, that if you want to try this out you can! From there, students can view mini-lessons or full lessons that are created by me. 

Here are examples of how I have used this application:

Last year I was a special education teacher and I covered 2 schools.  I created one lessons to touch on points and concepts even when I couldn't physically be there. Even though this school does not have iPads, the videos can still be accessed by logging in online. My para created an account and viewed anything I posted to share with the students. 

{Please be kind... I'm not the biggest fan of hearing myself recorded!}

  

In  math, on our maiden voyage with the application we were able to differentiate a lesson for the various needs of all of my students.  I put my students into two different groups. One group watched the same touch point money lesson that I created for the other school. The second group watched a video on decimals. Both videos had places where the students were to hit pause and work out examples on their whiteboards. I thought this made the process more interactive, and I or the paras in the room could see if the student's were starting to "get it", attempting... rather than just watching a video and zoning out. Once they hit play, the answer was given on the video and they continued until the end of the video. After the groups were done, we did hands on activities to apply what they learned about.

I've put other little videos with multiplication songs and tips/tricks as a reference for students to utilize throughout the day or at home to help them refresh on concepts.  

Students have also used Educreations to share with me. The most recent project using this app, had students creating a timeline based off of an information book that we had read. Students used the app to add pictures, text, and voice overs to explain what happened during each historical period. They've turned out great!

I love this application. I think that it has the potential to be used with a wide age range; both teacher and student led. With the Common Core State Standard initative, I know that students will need to explain more. Giving student's a problem and having them create a video to explain how to solve it to show their understanding could be another way to utilize this app. Explaining how to do a center and leaving an iPad or laptop for students to listen to as a reminder. Differentiating lessons. The possibilities are endless.  Currently, student's can't upload to a class on Educreations, but our tech gurus found a way to do this through My Big Campus (I think Edmodo would work as well, if you wanted students to upload their creations to you).

So what do you think? How can this app be used in your classroom?  How might you multiply yourself in your classroom?