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Welcome to EdTech Tuesday, I'm Rich Dixon. And I'm Jennifer Gibson. Jennifer, you're
going to show us an app called Inkflow. I love this app! It is super cool. I'm looking
forward to checking it out. I have not used it or seen it before, so let's start right
in. Tell us a little bit about it. First of all, it's free. The version that we're looking
at today is 3.4. It does have some in-app purchases; we'll talk a little bit about those
as we get into the app itself. Let's open it up. I've already done a little bit of playing
around with it, but what you're going to see here is we're on our dashboard, and you're
able to make a number of different, you can either have them be single sheets or books,
where you have a number of sheets together. In the free version, you are limited to how
many pages the books have, and in the fee version, you have unlimited. That is one thing
to note. Let's go ahead and take a look at the book I was working on last night. In this
particular book, you can see that I've sketched things out, and I've imported in a picture.
One of the things that I've noticed in the past, with using these kinds of sketch pads
and whatnot, is that it's really hard to use unless you have a stylus. That's what I find
to be really unique about this particular product. Let me show you something that they've
done. Let's say I'm looking at this house - we're going to work on a Little House on
the Prairie unit, was what I was thinking of - and so, I can zoom in. Notice how it's
taking me to zoom in here. Now I have some control over even just using my finger. Let
me go ahead and write something like, I can start to do cursive and really get a - you
couldn't do that on some of the old apps because it would just be your entire page. Maybe we
do something here: "vs. today." We're going to do some kind of comparison here. Now, let's
zoom out, and you notice I was able to get my notes right in there, don't mind my handwriting!
The other thing is that, if you were using a stylus, you could even get that much more
detail with it. As you want to work with these particular things, you can decide, "This page
is done, let's go onto a new page," and, Rich, I'll let you try it out. With the free version,
you only get the black pencil. If you upgrade to fee, you can get a palette of colors and
styluses and different things that are going on. They also have in the fee version, which
I think is pretty neat, is you can take a sketch on paper and take a photo of that sketch,
and it turns it into a drawing. What I want you to do is to try this tool here. Go ahead
and go around the area, maybe not even the entire area, and now you can take and move
this shape. If you had a small emblem or symbol, you could move it around the big page if you
wanted to, and we can undo things, there is an undo. I think there is a lot to this. Rich,
one thing that you might notice is this little, tiny, grayed-out area at the bottom here.
Why don't you go ahead and put that on? What do you think that is? I am guessing, based
off other note-taking apps that I've used before, that this is a palm rest, where you
can put your palm on the screen but still be able to write without making a mark because
sometimes, if you didn't have that, and you put your palm down and just start writing,
you see the screen moves around and whatnot. I think that's super useful. I love it. Me,
too; that's neat! Let's talk a little bit about some of the icons at the top menu here.
We talked about the arrow at the top of the page that allows us to sketch more ideas that
go with the theme that we're working on. We can also add here text and pictures. Go ahead
and select Text. It gives us a text box, and we're now able to start typing. We can go
ahead and put Done. Let's look here. We can click on this, and then you can import in
a picture, and then you're able to annotate your picture. I do see that there's a social
media connection in here with Instagram. There is. Talk about that. Basically it's taking
the Instagram pictures that I've already posted onto my Instagram account, so it's going into
that file. It's not going to Instagram in and of itself, it's just the pictures. And
then Repix is another app that I use for doctoring up pictures, so that's what that is. You are
not going live into a social media area, just things that you've created. Then there's also
a gallery that takes you back to our original page, so our menu of different pages here.
You can search by date and name because you can have a lot of different ones here. Here's
another book that I made. I brought in a picture. Here we go, we've got planning for the new
school year here, and you can see that you can bring in all kinds of pictures. You also
could actually do something like a narrative, where students could put in their pictures,
they could write about it, they could even bring in photos from a historical time period
and create a journal. Let's take Amelia Earhart, and they could create her "journal" from their
research and perspective they've done on her. Jennifer, I'm seeing a share icon. What options
are available there? Let's go ahead and take a look at it because under the share icon
they've actually put a lot more than you normally see there. So you can see Email and Export
to another app that you might already have. You have Tweet, you could tweet your photo
you've created, and Save it into your pictures. You can Lock it so that it is safe and your
fingers aren't causing marks. Also, this is one that I like, Rich: take a look at that.
This is interesting; this is nice because it provides a number of different backgrounds/paper
styles. I could see this, especially with math, for example if you wanted students that
needed to be able to work on digital handwriting, even the gridlines, or the ruled lines I should
say, would help with that. And then also music staff, as well. And this is big for a free
app to offer that because a lot of times those are in-app purchases in other similar apps.
Let's go back here to share. The other thing I wanted to point out is, if you decide that
you wanted to upgrade, this is where you would upgrade, and it gives you the information
of what you would get. It's $7.99 to upgrade to the pro version. You might not want to
do that, and that's ok; I think you can get a lot out of this app anyway. Excellent. Jennifer,
let's go back to the gallery real quickly, and I think I saw an Options button here,
the gear button. What do we have there? Why don't we open it up, and what we see here
is that if you wanted to publish these out to social media, and that's where you're going
outside of your own environment. They could put this on Twitter, you can change where
the toolbar is located, you've got high-res. PDFs that you can create so that you can share
these via email and printing and photos of that thing. It looks like Wrist Guard turned
off, which I call the palm rest, as we saw before, is turned on, but it looks like we
can turn that off, as well. We also have the nice viewer's guide and get email tips and
updates for using the Inkflow product. I think this is a great app, and it gives you a lot
of interesting things that you can do, but really the thing I like the most is the control
that you have even with just your finger in being able to write on paper an idea and create
drawings. We know cost is always an issue, so this being free, I think you could use
a lot of this for your class without having to upgrade to the fee. And worrying about
having to buy a stylus is also another issue. So, science, social studies, I think this
is a really versatile app for all of those things. Great, well thanks for sharing.