Month: April 2016

Educreations

Educreations is a unique interactive whiteboard and screencasting tool that’s simple, powerful, and fun to use. Annotate, animate, and narrate nearly any type of content as you explain any concept. Teachers can create short instructional videos and share them instantly with students, or ask students to show what they know and help friends learn something new.

You can try it for free and produce some great output. Paying for the full version (not that much) gives the full set of features.

Find out more at: https://www.educreations.com/faq/

 

Teaching in class with a mobile device

For so long now, whether we are about to speak to a classroom full of students or give a presentation at a conference or a meeting, we have gone armed with our slides on a memory stick or maybe on our laptop, so that they can be projected onto a room display screen.

If like me, you are a tablet user for most of the working day, wouldn’t it be easier, nicer even, to be able to walk in to a room with whatever you want to show – slides, video, web page etc – accessible on your tablet (or indeed phone) and just send whatever is on the screen of that to the main room display?

Well it would be easier for me, for a variety of reasons. For one thing I wouldn’t have to lug around my laptop, which I don’t very often now anyway. Also using the tablet just seems that much more spontaneous and opens up for use to me a range of presentation options that go beyond Powerpoint or Keynote. Check out Educreations for a neat way to create presentations on your iPAD that you can then deliver in a quite interactive way, provided of course that you can push the tablet display to the main screen in the room.

So, what’s stopping me from doing this all the time? Generally it’s the lack of any simple way of mirroring the display on my devices with the main room display. I can do it easily at home on my TV with both Apple and android devices but not currently in most lecture halls, seminar rooms or meeting venues.

However, things might just be about to change with a neat software solution called Reflector 2 that facilitates the mirroring of mobile devices to main display screens via any computer linked to the room data projector. Reflector has been around a while but universities seem to have been a bit slow to exploit it. However there are no major security or network barriers to its use. So, if you would like to mirror the screen on your mobile device to a classroom display, go nag your network and security team for help. It is possible to do and not at all expensive. And the icing on the cake is that your students can also, with your approval, mirror the contents of their tablet screen to the classroom display as well.

Using Padlet with a Large Class

This short video describes a very simple and straightforward use of Padlet to help to shape a classroom session with a large group of students. Take al ook and see if it is an approach that could work in your context – either with large or small group.