It's time to drag learning into the mobile era: Splashtop, maker of the popular remote desktop app, has announced that its Splashtop Whiteboard educational app is now available on the Kindle Fire tablet lineup.
The announcement should come as a relief to educators around the country; a 2010 survey by PBS and Grunwald Associates showed that teachers overwhelmingly want interactive whiteboards in the classroom. A full 68 percent said they value the technology, and interactive whiteboards landed at the top of the "want, but can't get" list for educators. Though it's not the same as a full-sized interactive whiteboard, Splashtop Whiteboard fills the same basic need for just $9.99.
Splashtop Whiteboard is built on top of the standard Editors' Choice award-winning Splashtop Remote Desktop app, which lets you access any program or stream any media stored on your computer straight to your Fire. The Whiteboard app adds an extra level of classroom-friendly functionality with the inclusion of annotation tools that let teachers highlight or write on the screen using virtual pens, highlighters and text tools of various colors. Educators can then save the marked-up screens to their tablet or email the image. Shading and spotlight tools help to hide or highlight specific areas of the screen.
Splashtop's press release crows that all 800 teachers in the Val Verde Unified School District in Riverside, California are outfitted with the app, and over 42,000 educators across the nation have downloaded the teaching assistant.
Splashtop Whiteboard's arrival on the Kindle Fire is fashionably late, actually; the app is already available on iOS, Android and the Nook. Before you rush out to download the app, note that it requires an active Wi-Fi connection for both your tablet and your computer. Splashtop Whiteboard won't work on its own -- not even the basic whiteboard function.
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