Knowmia is a new service that got a lot of tech press yesterday. The site was started by the same people who brought us the Flip camera. Now they’re trying to break into the flipped classroom with Knowmia.

Knowmia is a website and an iPad app for creating, sharing, and viewing video lessons. The website portion of Knowmia is a collection of videos made by teachers for students. There are roughly 7,000 videos in the Knowmia collection right now. Many of the videos are pulled from YouTube while others are hosted on Knowmia. The videos are arranged by subject and topic. Registered teachers can upload and tag their own videos.

The Knowmia iPad app is an app for creating your own whiteboard videos. I installed the app and gave it a try this evening. I found the app to have far more creation options than the similar Showme and Educreations apps. You can draw free-hand on the whiteboard screen or insert pre-made shapes. You can also use pictures and video clips in your video lesson.

Applications for Education
If you’re thinking about trying some “flipped” lessons this year, take a look at Knowmia and the Knowmia iPad app. And if you’re not using the flipped model, Knowmia has promise as a good place to find educational videos that your students can use to review or get “on demand” help when they cannot connect with you.

Right now it appears that only registered teachers can upload to Knowmia. Hopefully, they’ll add a student submission section in the future. That way students could use the Knowmia iPad app to create videos to demonstrate their understandings of a topic.