Product Overview: Educreations
Educreations is a versatile and user-friendly interactive whiteboard and screencasting tool designed to enhance teaching and learning experiences. Here’s a detailed look at what the product does and its key features.
What Educreations Does
Educreations transforms any iPad or web browser into a recordable, interactive whiteboard, allowing users to create dynamic video tutorials, lessons, and presentations. It enables teachers to produce and share instructional videos, while also providing students with a platform to demonstrate their understanding and engage in collaborative learning.
Key Features and Functionality
Content Creation
- Users can annotate, animate, and narrate content using various tools such as finger writing, styluses, and typed text. The app supports drawing images from scratch with 10 pen color options, adding photos from the camera roll, taking new photos, searching for photos on the web, or importing them from Dropbox.
- It includes four built-in background options: white paper, lined paper, graph paper, and a coordinate grid.
Multimedia Integration
- Educreations allows users to embed websites, images, and videos directly into their lessons. Users can also import documents, presentations, and webpages, and display custom maps.
Recording and Sharing
- The app records the iPad screen and overlays audio, creating slide-based videos that can be shared instantly via links, email, Messages, Facebook, Twitter, or by embedding them on a blog or website. Videos can also be saved to the Camera Roll, Dropbox, or Google Drive, especially with the Pro subscription.
Classroom Management
- Teachers can create classes within the app, and students can join using a unique course code. Lessons sync automatically between teacher and student accounts, ensuring easy access and monitoring of student work. Students without iPads can access classes and lessons through the Educreations website.
Cloud Storage and Accessibility
- Finished lessons are stored securely in the user’s online Educreations account, providing access from anywhere. The free version includes 5GB of cloud storage, sufficient for storing over 150 hours of lessons.
Student Engagement and Feedback
- Educreations supports student-centered learning by allowing students to create their own videos to demonstrate understanding, present information, or work in small groups. Teachers can provide rich audio/video feedback on student work, helping to gain deep insights into student comprehension.
Cross-Platform Compatibility
- The app is accessible on iPads and web browsers, making it a flexible tool for both in-class and remote learning environments.
Additional Benefits
- Pro Subscriptions: Educreations offers Pro subscriptions that provide additional features such as exporting videos to the Camera Roll, opening them in other apps, and using them in other video projects. Subscriptions are available for $11.99 per month or $99.99 per year.
- Community and Resources: Users have access to a community where they can share and view creations from other teachers and students, which can be a valuable resource for building lesson resources and saving time.
In summary, Educreations is a powerful, easy-to-use tool that enhances the digital classroom experience by facilitating the creation, sharing, and management of interactive video lessons, making it an invaluable resource for both teachers and students.