Educreations is a fabulous learning tool. Their motto is, Teach what you know. Learn what you don’t. Using the app for iPad or your browser window on your desktop, you create simple little videos that you can share with others. You have the option of making the videos private and sending a link to specific people or you can make your videos public. You can also browse the library of public videos on a variety of topics and skill level.
Educreations transforms our iPad into a recordable whiteboard that captures voice and handwriting and thereby produces amazing video lessons. It is very intuitive – as simple as touching, tapping, and talking. We were first introduced to Educreations by our Mandarin teacher, 老师。 I was immediately impressed with the technology and am excited to see how this tool can be used in education – there are so many ways this can be adapted to different learning tasks.
Example #1
老师 assigned a set of vocabulary words for my daughter and she was to practice writing the characters by creating a short video on Educreations. She then sent the link to him and he responded with another video pointing out the characters she had trouble with. Stroke order is important in learning Mandarin so in addition to writing characters over and over again – Educreations provides a way for teachers to check the order the strokes are done.
Here is a lesson she created on writing the characters for the numbers 1-10. She created this one as a sample to assure she understood what she would need to do. She has made this one public but most of her videos are private and shared only between her teacher and her parents. Though we occasionally send links to her proud grandparents as well. 🙂
Example #2
老师 sends a link to a video he creates that has characters and graphic images or pictures. The kids can then interact with his video by drawing a line to match the corresponding words and pictures.
Example #3
The student can create a video that incorporates photos and characters to tell a story about their trip to the market, how to make a recipe, or a fictional adventure story about a little hungry mouse.