Educreations Week

I love Educreations! When I was a regular classroom teacher I used it in a couple different subjects so students could demonstrate their learning in a few areas.  Now that I'm a computer teacher, I wanted to bring the same love to the masses.

I thought Educreations Week would be one week, but it turned into two weeks.  I realized anew that students need time to learn new skills and younger ones need lots of time to process step by step instructions.  Every elementary student in my school (K-6) experimented with Educreations and many of them built their first presentations.

Each grade level took on different tasks based on what their teachers wanted or what I felt they could handle.  Some students knew what to do from exposure last year, and some were clueless.  Some needed me to walk through every minute step (multiple times) and some just needed me to say, "Create an Educreations about..."

In general, here are the steps we took.
1.  Decide on your topic.  (We used plants, animals, Native Americans, and something learned in a different class.)
2.  Go to Safari and find pictures to fit your topic.
3.  Save your pictures to the Photo Stream.  (In my younger grades, this was the entire first class period.)
4.  Put your pictures on Educreations.
5.  Record your voice and pen markings.
6.  Share it with classmates.  (This was done different ways.  In some classes, we utilized the AppleTV. In some classes, I had them walk to each other's iPads to view.  In other classes, we took advantage of the fact that they all used the same Educreations account to view other presentations via the Cloud.)

While the videos with photos were fun, I actually loved the student-created pictures.  Kids drew pyramids and they drew Native American homes.  It was great to see the things they made!  I also had one student talk about hearts.  He found a heart picture and kept changing the size of it to make it look like it was thumping.

Overall, it was very instruction-heavy with me creating tons of example presentations, but it was so much fun!  Now, my hope is that the students will take this new-found knowledge back to their regular teachers and beg to make Educreations videos to demonstrate learning!