Monday, March 17, 2014

Logging Into Educreations With Your Google Account

MMSD teachers and students have been using Educreations as an iPad app for about a year and a half.  It has proven to be a powerful tool, despite its simplicity.   Because it is a web-based tool, Educreations can be used on a PC with a browser such as Firefox or Chrome.   We like this "cross-platform" application as it isn't device-specific.  Students can use it to record their processes as they work through problems on the whiteboard, annotate images and documents, and then share the recordings with teachers and parents.

One of the drawbacks to using web-based tools is that the tool requires the student to create an account in order to store and share their content.   Lately, though, a lot of web-based tools are integrating with Google Apps for Education in order to use the tools with the students district Google account.  This is of great value to teachers wishing to avoid creating yet another student account.

Why is this important?
Being able to log in will allow students to keep their recordings online, and then the recordings can be accessed from any computer or mobile device.  Using the generic "not-logged-in" version of the application limits the recording to stay on the iPad, but it can't be saved elsewhere unless the creator has an account.  Logging in with the student's Gmail account is a way to bypass this and save students' recordings off of the iPad.

On The PC
If you are not using Educreations on an iPad, you can still go to the site to create new recordings or see the recordings you made elsewhere.  Go to http://www.educreations.com and choose to log in with Google.  The process will be the same as the iPad (see below).

On the iPad
If the account is not logged in, a student can log in by creating a recording and pressing "SAVE".  Following the prompts through the save process will be a log in screen with an option to log in with Google.

Tapping on this button will give you a Google log in screen, like this:


However, the way MMSD students and staff log in is different. We can force the log in screen to go to the MMSD domain by typing in the district email address and pressing SIGN IN, without the password. The next screen will look like this:


Once you're logged in, you can now save your Educreations in this account and access it anywhere, iPad or PC, as long as you continue to log in with this account.

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