Educreations,
Showme,
Screenchomp are simple and multifaceted for the language classroom. These free screencasting apps have multiple possibilities, ranging from recording students' dialogues or letting them freely talk about a subject as they show on the screen what they are exploring. There's drawing, typing a text or inserting an image while recording. The students can change colors, sizes, forms in a totally intuitive way.
Besides all these advantages of language production, once it is ready, you can publish them on a website and share your students' work with parents, the students themselves and the world.
Here's an example of what my students produced. They had to create their own stores:
Which one would be interested in visiting?
This is just one of the possibilities for these screencasting apps. I like to consider them a platform to enhance students' creativity and free production, but it certainly goes beyond. Here, for example, I used Educreations to create a challenge for my students. We were studying the difference between "Used to" and "would". They had to listen to both stories and check the differences and try to guess which version was the correct one:
How about teachers and students creating tutorials? Easy with these tools, just some touch and clicks away!
By now I think you can really picture how nice these apps can be for the language classroom, but there is one way you can use one iPad to turn it into an interactive board. What you need to do it? Only the iPad and a projector in the classroom! You can just open the app type, draw, show images, move things around and record what you are saying as you go, and all this can be projected for students. You can add things to the white board, as well as delete them. However, more exciting than that is inviting students to come to the front and teach a lesson, touching things in the app, making them gain life as others interact with the learner. If you wish, you can even share the lesson afterwards with your students by just sending the link to it. Ready to give this idea a try? I'm sure you'll be amazed by its potential, and would love to know the results if you try using these screencasting apps as an interactive board!
One nice example of super simple activity that has worked wonders is from my friend Claudio Fleury. He was having a hard time to get his teen students to hand in their paragraphs. First, he worked a bit on paragraph structure with the students. Then, he took the iPads to class and asked students to write their paragraphs using the Notes app. They were on task, focused. The job of receiving every student's paragraph was easily accomplished. Students also realized that they could read each other's paragraphs as the notes were all synchronized (we use the same iTunes account in all iPads) real time. Then, the teacher asked students to email him their paragraphs. The teacher could easily print them and write his feedback on the paragraphs. In the following class, the teacher handed in the notes, students checked the teacher feedback, got the iPads and reviewed their paragraphs based on what the teacher had written. Writing has never been so effective. Getting students to write and review their work, never been so easy!
