Educreations - 24 views
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Vicki Davis on 22 Dec 11Move over Khan Academy. Educreations is here with a super simple web or iPad app that lets you record lessons to share with your students, wherever they are. If they enable one thing like common core tagging (tag it with the standard) and enough contribute we will have an incredibly powerful tool.
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Claude Almansi on 22 Dec 11The strength of Khan Academy's tutorials is content and clear presentation of this content. I didn't find either in Educreations' showcased examples: most could just be presented as a good old slideshow. Granted, a few do have an audio comment. But you can do that with slidecasts too (e.g. you can synch an audio file with your slides on Screencast.net or on MyPlick.com) Moreover, there is no way to caption such Educreations presentations including audio for the deaf, which means they can't be used in schools in US, Italy and other countries that have laws imposing accessibility for all for educational materials. And you can't subtitle them for people who don't know the original language, which severely curtails the potential use. Khan Academy, on the other hand has an international captioning/subtitling team - see http://gigaom.com/video/khan-academy-universal-subtitles/ . So OK, Educreations have an iPad app - the point is that Khan Academy's tutorials don't need one. The real difference is that Educreations' content is crowdsourced and the content of Khan Academy's tutorials isn't: not enough to outweigh the accessibility and internationalization issues above. Teachers can already produce their own online tutorials as slideshows, slidecasts or videos that can be captioned/subtitled in other languages with other platforms.