Educreations

Recommended age range: Kinder-12th grade and beyond
Rating in iTunes: 4 stars
My Rating: 4 stars

User Friendliness: The learner can easily launch and navigate the app independently. It does take some practice, however, to create a lesson from beginning to end without making errors, as the app does not allow the user to view the lesson and then go back and edit. The lesson can be paused while the user is typing or uploading pics, helping the finished product look more professional and polished.

Critical Thinking: The app does allow for critical thinking. Not only can a lesson be created by an educator for learners to access and watch, but the learners can also use the app to create videos for their peers to showcase their knowledge of content with drawings, voice, pics, and pages.

Differentiation: The app is flexible to meet the learners' needs by allowing viewers to watch a video several times, pause, rewind, and share. Lessons created and shared by other Educreations users can be accessed by the learners as well. In addition, the learners can create videos as simple as a pic with voice-over to a several page storyboard.

Motivation: The learners will be motivated and engaged while using this app. It's fun to use and the learners will be able to navigate it easily. Being an app that allows for drawing, pics, and voice, it gives the user many tools that make creating lessons fun. Educreations is a much more motivating tool than Power Point or slideshow apps.

Assessment/Reporting: The app does provide an end product that can be assessed by the educator or by peers. The app allows teachers to set-up classrooms where their learners can share their creations. The lessons can be viewed by the educator and not other peers in the digital classroom. The app could be even better if the users in the classroom could share with each other as well.

Account: The app does require an account set-up prior to use, but it is free. There is a "teacher" version and a "student" version of the app, allowing the educator to set up classrooms.

Educational Application: I will use this app in my course by creating lessons that involve drawing, labeling, and describing the processes involved in several different earth science models, including the Moon formation, layers of interior earth and convection currents, and divergent and convergent boundaries. I have used my actual classroom whiteboard for these concepts in the past as the learners copy the drawings and notes into their lab notebooks.

Reflection: I have created a lesson of interior earth that includes pics, a drawing of the layers and labels of each, and a voice-over description of the movement of heat and materials within the mantle. The video will be posted to a class site for the learners to access after drawing the same thing in their lab notebooks. Learners can access the video as much as needed to understand and perfect their own drawing of the model. Learners could also re-create the lesson on their own using the app.

Angela Barnes Binder
Earth and Space Science
CHS