Helping great people build great companies

by Alyson Shontell

Two and a half years ago, San Kim presented a startup called Easel on stage at DreamIt Ventures Demo Day in Philadelphia.

The former high school math and science teacher presented interactive workbooks for the iPad alongside 14 other startups; he hoped to land $300,000 in financing.

He and his cofounder bootstrapped Easel without much success. The next two years, Kim tells us, were a series of pivots. Last summer, they finally created something that showed promise.

ShowMe is a simple iPad app that acts like a teacher’s whiteboard. It’s a blank white screen with a few colors for drawing and built-in audio.

If you want to create a quick lesson, like teaching someone how to solve X+4 =7, create a title, press play, draw, and talk. When you’re finished, the lesson will automatically be uploaded to ShowMe’s site, which students can peruse.

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Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/showme-adding-500000-lessons-per-month-2012-5#ixzz1tjAWgR5V

by Sarah Cargill

ShowMe Founder San Kim joins us today to discuss how ShowMe, a mobile app that allows educators to record and share whiteboard lessons with students, is tapping into the knowledge of great teachers to deliver quality lessons to students around the globe. San Kim first developed the idea of a whiteboard-based online teaching technology while working as a tutor and classroom instructor in high school math, science, writing and more. ShowMe was founded in 2009 and took several years to develop into the simple and widely used app that it is today.

How is ShowMe currently introduced into the classroom? What are some of the primary teaching methods educators are adopting with the app?

Teachers use ShowMe in all kinds of different ways, from creating lessons for kids to watch at home, or recording ShowMes during class time, to even turning the table and asking the students to create lessons on what they’ve learned (“learning by teaching” model). We feature lots of these use cases and best practices on http://showme.com/blog.

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http://gettingsmart.com/blog/2012/03/qa-showme-founder-taps-into-the-great-teachers-of-the-world/

by David Hill

In 2011, the poster child of digital education was the Khan Academy, Sal Khan’s brainchild of over 3,000 lessons, but a new star is emerging for 2012 that’s taking Khan’s approach to the crowd. It’s a free whiteboard app called ShowMe that will currently play 1.5 million teacher-produced lessons. The first iteration of the app has been downloaded over 400,000 times. Now, with an updated version that empowers users to create, search and share lessons, it’s ready to emerge as a leader in the digital education revolution ushered in by the iPad.

ShowMe, like other whiteboard apps, captures what users draw on the iPad screen but it also records their voice. Creations are then stored and can be shared with others. For users, ShowMe capitalizes on the touch computing of the iPad, which feels more interactive than a mouse and keyboard, but it also provides the “pen on paper” look-and-feel. While glossy educational animations can do a lot to teach concepts, ShowMe captures more intuitive learning by showing handwritten sketches and notes as well as showing them revealed in real time. This lends itself to following along with the reasoning behind explanations that makes certain teachers so successful in helping students learn.

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