Educreations Deserves a Big Thumbs Up

The Educreations app keeps getting better and better with each update! One of the biggest problems my students had with Educreations was... they would set up their project with excellent slides and then they would start recording and make a mistake with what they said, or an announcement would blare over the intercom, or a teacher had to say something out loud to the whole class, or students accidentally started recording when they had not planned on recording. Then disappointed students would have to delete their whole project and start over. With the latest update an eraser has been added to the available tools so that users can delete their recording with the rest of their project left untouched. The eraser will also clear an entire page rather than having to click the undo option several times or the user can clear just the ink and leave any pictures that were imported. Another wonderful new feature of Educreations is the ability to sign in with a Google account. Many schools have gone the Google Apps for Education route. For students, this is an awesome feature because there are so many great iPad apps or 2.0 tools that require an account. Students and/or educators are having to create a gazillion accounts, ok, not that many, but definitely more than they can keep track of. This will mean one less account for students and teachers who have a Google account.

Wish list for the next update... If the lovely developers of Educreations were to add a laser pointer and the ability to export an Educreations to the iPad's photo gallery, this app would be one of the most useful apps for a classroom. The laser pointer would be helpful for students who are using Educreations for fluency practice and reflection and exporting to the photo gallery would allow for easier sharing on blogs, websites and wikis. As of right now Educreations does supply an embed code, but when an Educreations is embedded onto a web presence the Educreation can not be viewed right from the blog, wiki, or website. Instead readers have to be redirected to the app for viewing. This feature would also allow the user to use an Educreations within other applications like Splice or iMovie. It would be very nice to take Educreations a step further and be able to use it in a work flow from one app to another.