After a long day this week, I decided to tear myself away from the desk but alas, there was preparation for our tech training class to be done. So, I pulled out the iPad, got cozy on the bed and fired up two apps.

The Tools

One of them – believe it or not – is an app I bought for my daughter. It’s called Drawing Pad. She absolutely adores it and despite my challenge with drawing and graphics I love doodling on it too.

The other is AirSketch. This one is a work tool. AirSketch is essentially a whiteboard type application but it has a neat feature that allows you to broadcast your whiteboard locally so anyone in your office can just pull up a web browser, type in the IP address for the app and voila! Everything you draw or write shows up on their browser. It is so very cool.

The How

How can these two apps replace PowerPoint? Remember, I said I was not working on the computer but I still wanted something that look like slides.

Step One

Using Drawing Pad, I loaded a fun background and used a brush to write my slide heading. If there was text I could add them otherwise I just left the space blank so I can use AirSketch to illustrate my points later. I created a bunch of blank slides with headers and saved them all to Photos.

Step Two

Next in AirSketch, I loaded the photos as the background and saved them in the correct order of my presentation.

Step Three

When it came time for class, I used the share desktop feature in my conference room, opened the browser and loaded AirSketch into it. Now, I am ready to display each slide and free to annotate, draw, illustrate to my heart’s content. Loved it!

Even though my conference room has the ability to do white board, I find it a million times easier to draw on an iPad using a Stylus than trying to draw with a mouse. It’s also more natural, like teaching in a real classroom except you’re writing on the iPad instead of the chalk board.

More Reasons To Love It

You can get pretty creative, fun and even polished and professional if you want. Drawing Pad app is not required. I used it because I wanted to create slides while away from the computer. The key is AirSketch and the ability to share your desktop in your conference room. If you are teaching in a real life classroom you will need to hook your computer up to a projector.

There are other neat features in AirSketch too like import PDF’s so you can essentially load your slides into the app and draw/annotate on it as you present. You can change the colors of your pen, there are 5 pen types to choose from and you can undo – great feature. I messed up in my annotation during class once and just hit undo.

Watch A Demo

My drawing skills aren’t the best so the ‘slide’ may not be up to par for some of you but you can certainly load up professionally created graphics as your background.

What It Costs

AirSketch cost me $9.99. There is a free one but with very limited options and Drawing Pad was $1.99 definitely so easy on the wallet and worth every single penny. What more, the freedom to step away from the computer is hugely liberating. Highly recommended if you teach a lot of webinars or love doing recorded videos.