Today, however, I am sharing with you a set of some wonderful apps that you can use to create short video lessons and tutorials to share with your students. You can also use them to :
- Easily explain a range of topics from math to chemistry to music theory to basket weaving.
- Attach a personal message to any travel photos you want to share
- Diagram offensive and defensive strategies for sports
- Grade student work with commentary explaining the reasoning behind their performance
- Implement a “flipped classroom”
- Showcase your tutorials online and share your knowledge with your students, friends, family, or the world!
I have meticulously handpicked the apps mentioned below and only included what I personally see as the best available out there.
1- Educreations
This is my favourite of them all. Educreations allows you to create short video recordings that can include your own voice, text, drawings, sketches, and pictures. Some of the features that Educreations provide to its users include :
• Record and replay your voice, handwriting and drawings
•Draw in 10 colors of incredibly realistic digital ink
• Add text to any page
• Add photos from the iPad camera, Photo Albums, Dropbox or the Web
• Animate images by dragging them around while recording
• Create multiple whiteboard pages
• Scroll pages up or down when you need extra space
• Easily erase drawing mistakes
• Unlimited undo and redo
• Pause/resume or start over recording anytime
• Create a free account on educreations.com and choose who can view your lessons
• Share your lessons via email, Facebook and Twitter
• Embed your lessons on your blog or website
2- ShowMe
ShowMe is similar to Educreations in that it also allows you to turn your iPad into a recordable iPad. You can use this app to record tutorials and short video lessons to share with your students. Some of the features ShowMe provides to its users include :
- Record your ShowMe tutorial right away — no manuals or complicated menus needed
- Drop in images onto the whiteboard
- Easily switch between drawing and erasing (as well as pausing and playing) to make your ShowMe flow from concept to concept
- You can make your ShowMe as long or as short as it needs to be, and record as many ShowMe’s as you want. Go nuts!
- Once you’re finished recording, upload your ShowMe to share with the community (or keep it private if you prefer)
- Discover awesome tutorials created by other members of the ShowMe community
Using DoodleCast Pro you will be able to create beautiful drawings and presentations on your iPad. The app also supports audio recording allowing you to illustrate your drawings with your own recorded voice. Some of its features include :
• Set backgrounds and import your own images
• Support for multiple pages as well as undo and redo
• Save videos and images directly to your photo album
• Built-in support for sharing via Dropbox, YouTube and email
• Multiple brush and pointer styles
• Control over colours, line weight and opacity
• New rewind feature lets you fix mistakes quickly
Explain Everything is a great interactive whiteboard that allows you to create screencasts and video tutorials using annotation, animation, narration, importing, and exporting almost anything to and from almost anywhere. Some of its features include :
Board Cam transforms your iOS device* in an enhanced document camera or a whiteboard. Perform live dynamic presentations of objects, interact with images stored in your device, draw on a whiteboard or over video streaming** without changing of application… while you record videos! Record outstanding tutorials and how to videos. What you do is what they see.
6- Ask3
Ask3 turns classroom iPads into recordable whiteboards enabling peer-to-peer teaching and collaboration. While anyone can use Ask3, we are seeking input from teachers focused on team-building and student collaboration.
7- Knowmia
Knowmia Teach is a new free lesson planning and recording tool for teachers and their students. It helps you create short video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia.com so students, other teachers and the public can find them. Knowmia Teach makes it easy to bring in visual aids from multiple sources, organize them in steps (like slides in a presentation) and use your own voice and fingers to bring your lesson to life. You can design each step in the lesson, record illustrations as you draw them, and create sophisticated animation sequences with a simple stroke of a finger. We also give you the ability to describe your lesson in a way that makes it simple for anyone who is interested in the subject to find your video.
