I’ve been playing around with a new iPad app for a few days and just have to tell you about it. It’s one of the most fun tools for teaching digitally that I’ve come across. Watch the video above to see a little of what it can do.

(By the way, I’m working on getting the featured videos to show up in my RSS feed, so if you’re an RSS subscriber, please bear with me. I hope to have that done by the end of the week.)

As you can see from the video, it’s called Doodlecast Pro. It makes it really simple to record your voice along with doodles, annotations, and any pictures from your camera roll. It comes with tons of preset backgrounds like lined paper, grid paper, music staves, sports fields, or even storyboards. And it makes sharing your recorded videos really easy.

Perhaps the best thing about the app is its price. At just $$3.99 it’s significantly cheaper than Apple’s Keynote and much more natural to use, in my opinion.

Paired with an iPad Digital AV Adapter  or with Airplay to a Mac or Apple TV, I think this app has the potential to change the way teachers or speakers share with their audiences. I’d love to see some innovative presentations using Doodlecast Pro in the future, perhaps a little like this one.

I also look forward to seeing what additional capabilities they add to the app in later versions.

Incidentally, I’ve also been using the Cosmonaut iPad stylus for a while now and it works really well with Doodlecast Pro. I like that it feels more like a whiteboard marker than a pen, which is better for the type of writing and drawing that I do on the iPad.

A great way to get images for your presentations is to take them yourself. Unfortunately, most of us don’t consider ourselves skilled enough to take high quality pictures on our own. But with some of the latest releases from Apple, it looks to me like it’s gonna be easier than ever to get better at photography. Here’s three reasons why.

1. iPhone volume button becoming a shutter button.

They say that if you want to get better at photography you need to carry a camera with you everywhere you go. But unless you’re already a photographer chances are you don’t lug your camera around most days. That is until your cell phone became a camera. The iPhone has a great camera in it, but it’s always been a little awkward to get to the app and to trigger the shutter since you have to touch the screen (rather than a physical button) to take the picture. Apple announced recently that iOS five will add a button to turn on the camera directly from the lock screen. Also, when using the camera, the volume up switch will become the shutter button, which will make the phone behave a lot more like a real camera. Add to that the ability to use the headphone volume controls to trigger the shutter, too, and the iPhone is quickly becoming more of a serious photography device.

2. Photo Stream makes it easier to get your pictures off the device.

One of the real problems with using my iPhone to take pictures, though, is moving those pictures to, well, anywhere else. Of course I can email them to myself, but that seems so clunky. With the newly announced iCloud, though, all of the pictures you take on the phone will automatically sync to your other devices, making it easy to share them, save them, etc. This is a big deal because just making things more convenient makes me more likely to use them. I’m betting you feel the same way.

3. Snapseed

The iPad already has a lot of good photo-editing apps, but the problem for me has been trying to get my pictures on to the iPad in the first place. This is a little easier if you have the camera connection kit, but still it’s not ideal. iCloud seems to be solving that (hopefully), which put me on the lookout for the best photo editing app out there. Recently I found Snapseed, a really powerful but still fun and easy to use photo editing iPad app. I’ve been using it for a week or so now and I have to say that it’s controls are really easy to figure out and make the whole process of editing photos much easier and more fun than any other app I’ve tried. And it’s a steal at just $4.99.