Educreations Review

I’ve started the new school year out with a free app that’s new to me called Educreations.  It was recommended by my colleague, Gina Gladstone, as we compiled a list of the best speech and language apps.  As I started this school year, I decided to adjust the way I lesson plan in order to be a bit more thoughtful about developing and providing cohesive therapy throughout the year.   I’ve done this by creating broad monthly themes in the areas of social skills and language.  I collaborate with the teachers in the autism classrooms on developing monthly social skills themes.  My social skills theme for the month of September has been School Community.  This involves understanding the school rules and getting to know the people in your school community.  I then linked my language objectives which was descriptive language by creating activities where students use descriptive language to describe their physical characteristics, personality traits and items in their community.

Educreations is a FREE interactive whiteboard app for the iPad.  It allows you to create video tutorials about anything under the sun.  For my week in therapy, we used it to create videos involving descriptive language.  For students with language delays, it is wonderful to have not only the oral feedback but also the written, tactile, and visual feedback when teaching new vocabulary and concepts.  My students loved searching the google images to describe their personality traits (positive, fearful, loyal, etc.) and were highly engaged throughout the session.

It is an extremely straightforward app to use.  It allows you to record your voice while drawing or typing information onto the whiteboard.  You can include pictures from your photo library or search hundreds of google images for the perfect image.  The recording feature automatically pauses while you search for images and restarts seamlessly to create a very smooth finished video.  You can save and share videos with other Educreation users.  This is a great tool that can be used in so many creative ways.  Check out the Educreations site to see some of those ways!

PROS:

• Easy to use
• Great images available
• Images çan be animated.  Check out FAQ section
• Easy to import photos from the photo library
• Recording feature
• Videos can be saved and shared
• FREE

CONS:

• Not yet able to upload video clips.  I would like this feature for teaching social communication skills.

RECOMMENDED: YES 5 out of 5 stars