There has been a new genre of iPad apps released lately (ShowMe, ScreenChomp) that allow one to record what happens on the screen – anything from drawing to writing to completing sums – along with a live audio narration. This is brilliant for being able to make podcasts / instructional movies anywhere anytime. It also makes such a process available for students to demonstrate what they know by similarly making such recordings and sharing with each other.

What all have so far lacked is a local export to camera roll option. They all seem to be cloud hosted requiring an account and web connection etc for sharing. I thought that such a limitation was strange seeing as a large target market for such apps is schools that often have restrictions on Internet access or on students signing up to any old web service. So, when I picked up on Explain Everything (http://t.co/GDRAfvW) from a #slide2learn tagged tweet today (thanks @techieteacher), I was intrigued.

For $3, it not only has this local export feature included, but a raft of others that make it feel like a 2.0 or 3.0 release in comparison to the others I’ve tried in this genre – like import of PDFs, powerpoint or keynote files, and full Dropbox and Evernote integration. For those like me who use Evernote to ‘remember everything’, being able to pull in any note I have stored there and annotate over the top, or even record a narration, then export this enhanced note straight back is brilliant. For students, they can import an existing PowerPoint presentation and just draw and highlight over the top of slides, all the while verbally explaining, and export to a movie that encapsulates their understanding much better than the mere slides would.

For educators, it means the option to create video podcasts is now available whenever and wherever we require it. Watch out for some from me real soon.

http://t.co/GDRAfvW 

 

Lots of potential here as mobile learning devices. Will be available in north America soon, hopefully the rest of the world later, and there is an SDK for developers to add extra games. I do wonder though if a similar thing could be done with an iOS app that pairs with other iPods or iPads or other tablets/ app devices for the same functionality?