Inkflow" | EdTech Tuesday | Professional Development

Welcome to Ed Tech Tuesday. I'm Rich Dixon. And I'm Jennifer Gibson. Alright 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. Okay. So first of all, it's free. And the version that we're looking at today is 3.4. And it does have some in-app purchases. We'll talk a little bit about those as we get into the app itself. So let's open it up. I've already done a little bit of playing around with it. What you're going to see here is that we're kind of 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 get unlimited. So that is one thing to note. Let's go ahead and take a look at the book that 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 was using these kind of sketch pads and whatnot. Is that it's really hard to use unless you have a stylus. And that's what I find to be really unique about this particular product. So 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 in 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. So now I have some control over even just using my finger. And let me go ahead and write something like, you know, I can start to do cursor. And really get a... You know, you couldn't do that on some of the old apps because it would just be your entire page. You know, and maybe we do something here versus, let's say, today. We're going to do some kind of comparison here. And now let's zoom out. And you notice that I was able to, you know, get my notes right in there. Okay, mind my handwriting. Don't mind it, I mean. And then the other thing is that if you were using a stylus, you could even get that much, you know, more detail with it. As you want to work with these particular things, you can decide, okay, this page is done. Let's go ahead and go on to a new page in which I'll let you try it out. Now with the free version, you only get the black pencil. If you upgrade to fee, you can get a palette of colors and stylus 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. So 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. And so if you had a small emblem or a symbol, you could move it around the big page if you wanted to. And we can undo things there, there is an undo. And I just think there's a lot to this. So 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. Okay. What do you think that is? Okay, I am guessing based off of 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 you start writing, you'll see the screen moves around and whatnot. I think that's super useful. I think you do, it's neat. I love it. Okay, 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, you know, sketch more ideas that go with the theme that we're working on. We can also add here text and pictures. So go ahead and select text. Gives us a text box, and we're able to now start typing. Right. Okay, we can just go ahead and hit done. And then let's look here. You click on this, and then you can import in a picture. And then you're able to annotate that picture. Now, I do see that there's a social media connection here with Instagram. There is. Talk about that. Well, basically, it's taking the Instagram pictures that I have 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 out live into a social media area, just things that you've created. And then there's also a gallery that takes you back to our original page. And so our menu of different pages here. So 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. Really, oh, there we go. We've got planning for the new school year here. And you can see that, you know, you can bring in all kinds of pictures. And you actually could 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 like Amelia Earhart and they could create her journal from their research and perspective they've done on her. Okay, Jennifer, I'm seeing the 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 that 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. Oh, 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. The grid paper. If you wanted students that needed to be able to work on digital handwriting, even the grid lines or the ruled lines, I should say, would help with that. And then also music staff as well. I know. And that's nice for a free app to offer that because a lot of times those are in-app purchases and other similar apps. So let's go back here to share. The other thing that 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. And it's $7.99 to upgrade to the pro version. You might not want to do that, and that's okay. I think you can get a lot out of this app anyway. Excellent. Well, 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 go ahead and open it up? And what you can see here is that if you wanted to publish these out to social media, and that's where that 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 e-mail and printing and photos of that thing. Oh, and it looks like wrist guard turned off, which is what I called there the palm rest, which we saw before. It's turned on, but it looks like we can turn that off as well. And they also have the nice viewer's guide and get e-mail tips and updates for using the Ink Flow product. I think this is just a great app, and it gives you a lot of interesting things that you can do. 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.