The big new thing at the 2014 Denver and Chicago conferences was the interactive whiteboard app called Educreations. Interactive whiteboards electronically capture your voice and handwriting to bring to life just-completed stories in your comprehensible input classes. Students can use the iPad to visually recreate stories in much the same way that the classroom artists currently do. If a class has access to an iPad, the artist will certainly want to use it to draw the story.
We are digging deeper now and finding other apps that may work better than Educreations. The big rap on Educreatons was that it allowed no editing after the narration was saved, which got to be annoying for a lot of us who were playing with it this summer after someone told a story.
David Talone offered one option this morning:
…in terms of ipad apps for drawing a story and then narrating it, I much prefer Explain Everything to Educreations. It does cost 4 or 5 dollars, but it allows you to narrate over each individual slide, and you can also edit the narration, which is impossible in Educreations. I had success exporting the movies as mp4s and sharing them with the kids on Google docs and projecting them for the class….
In addition, here is a list of some of the other whiteboards that are appearing on the market as we speak:
Doceri ($4.99)
ShowMe (free)
Whiteboard HD ($4.99)
Syncpace ($8.49)
Jot! (free)
BaiBoard (free)
Groupboard (free for 5 students)