Cool Tools: Clarisketch

Overview

Have you ever needed a quick and easy way to annotate and explain a visual concept, plan, or process? If so, Clarisketch is a painless solution to all of your annotation needs. Here’s a quick (and silly) Clarisketch I made in about 15 seconds. 

Process

So here’s what the Clarisketch process looks like on my junky LG Dynamic II Andorid phone. You probably have a better phone than me.

Step 1:  Open Clarisketch and choose your media type

Clarisketch gives you the option of creating a brand new sketch without media (essentially a drawing), creating a sketch from a pre-existing picture that already lives on your phone, or creating a sketch from a picture that you take from within Clarisketch. I used the second option for the pie annotation video.

  

Step 2: Create your video

Once you select a media type Clarisketh automatically switches to annotation mode. One nice thing about the annotation mode is that no actual recording takes place until you start talking. You can see this in the screenshot below.

You can see some of the other features below including:

Once you get done recording just hit the record button again to stop the process.

Step 3: Share your video

If you’re happy with your results you can go ahead and share. The sharing menu is the standard 3-node graphic shown below.

Once you click it you’ll see this screen:

So yeah Clarisketch does force you to share your sketch on their site. Fortunately you do have control over whether your sketch is public or unlisted. Once you get done sharing to the Clarisketch site you then get a “Share via” screen with a ton of options. Woohoo! I used the Gmail option to send the video to myself before I embedded it here.

If you like you can also visit your sketches on the Clarisketch website after logging in.

Platforms

Clarisketch is available for free on all Google-enabled tablets, Android smartphones, and Chromebooks. Although you can’t create Clarisketch videos on desktops or laptops you can watch them on all devices without downloading the app. Clarisketch also works in all browsers.

Tutorial

Here’s a quick tutorial explaining how to use Clarisketch if you need more details:

Examples

Here are two more Clarisketch examples to inspire you: 

Educational Uses

You’ve probably already thought of a ton of ways to use Clarisketch in your own classes. A few suggestions include:

• Providing student feedback
• Annotating graphs or other visual diagrams
• Diagramming math problems