mLearning - Turn your Ipad into an Interactive Board

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?

Which one would you be interested in visiting?

Fitch

Paradise Truck

Pink Glamour

or View Results

Create your own poll at Flisti.com

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!

m-Learning - Screencasting App

I downloaded showmeapp to my iPad.

You can write on the whiteboard and record a screencast, or you can use an image to record your impressions, stories, tutorials using it.

Here's my example for basic students:


http://www.showmeapp.com/sh/?i=5220

I uploaded it from my iPad straight to the site. From there, you can embed the video or share it in social networks.

How can we use showmeapp in the classroom?

You can give the device to your students and ask them to record a tutorial, an explanation about certain topic, a summary of the class.
You can think of riddles, brainboosters and challenges. Record them and ask the students to solve them.

In this video, I talked about my family and friends. I could ask questions related to what I said.

Now, I have a challenge for you: I made a mistake in the video. Can you tell me what is wrong?

Cool Tool of the Week - Toasting My Screen

Today, via Coolcatteacher in Twitter, I came across Screentoaster, a free online screencasting option with no need to download any apps to your computer.

They are still in Beta and you need an invitation code, which I got in my email immediately after I requested it.

It's very straightforward to record your screen there following the instructions. The audio you record after you've captured the screen, which feels a little awkward, but it's manageable after some practice. You can also add subtitles after having captured the screen.

Then, it's just a matter of publishing it and getting the embeddable code.

Free online screencasting tool

All in all, screentoaster is a nice free option to prepare tutorials, show specific collections of pages and adding voice comment.

In this first toasted screen above, I talked about a very nice Flickr post Cheryl Oakes sent to me. It can be very useful for our educational visual explorations.