Griffin Technology is a company you might not know by name, but you would probably recognize many of the accessories they develop to keep our mobile devices charged and secure while at home or on-the-go.

So — here is one of their newest concepts. What if you could transform your iPad so that your children could actually use a marker or crayons to safely draw on top of it? Well meet the Griffin LightBoard Case.

The LightBoard Case is a blue and green plastic outer frame with a clear plastic screen covering on the inside.  You place your iPad inside the LightBoard and after you secure it safely inside, you turn it over and attach a piece of paper under the clipboard clip. Once you download the free LightBoard Trace App, you are ready to launch any one of the games or tracing applications.  Included in the package were 50 sheets of thin paper and one free, black, washable marker. After you draw the item in black marker, children can take the paper off the iPad and color it in with all sorts of their favorite markers, crayons, etc. Only soft leaded pencils, crayons and washable felt tip markers are recommended to use with the cover.Don’t worry, you can still access the volume on the iPad through the case, as well as hook up your charger, all with the outer case attached.

The LightBoard Trace app itself involves a few different activities.With “Fishy Friends” and “Backyard Bugs,” using a color background andanimation, the app will teach you how to draw 5 different sea creatures and 5 insects in step-by-step fashion. With “Robot Mixer” and “Magical Mashup,” use different combinations of tops and bottoms to create unique monsters and robots to trace.  In “Dot 2 Dot,” the child will trace from one blinking light to another to create one of 5 different pictures.  In “Who at the Zoo,” kid’s trace small portions of a zoo animal, though you don’t trace the line’s in order, so it could be fun for kid’s to try to use their planning skills to guess what they might be drawing. The “Family Fun” activity will teach you how to draw people in the family that could include Mom, Dad, Sister, Brother, Baby Boy and Baby Girl. “Write it” allows kid’s to first type different words on the iPad on-screen keyboard, than it translates the letters into block letters which can also be traced and eventually colored in.

In all of the activities there is the ability to either speed up or slow down the directions, which is great for younger preschool aged children or children who, in general, require a bit more time to process directions.

I have never have an ounce of drawing ability to create anything that looks representational of what I had in mind and as luck would have it, I work with kids on drawing and tracing all the time.  I see their frustration as well where they quickly draw a boring stick and as educators we tend to ask kids for more detail. With the LightBoard App kids can practice the pictures step-by-step, so, over time they should be able to learn to draw some basic animals and people that are more representative of real looking people and objects.

In terms of future development of this app, I do wish there were a way to scale the image and resize it. That way you could create a whole scene on one piece of paper with the different characters. Otherwise, it is nice the animals are simple to draw and large, but I found myself using multiple pieces of paper. Since the pictures can’t be resized now, I would suggest tracing, coloring and cutting out the picture then gluing them onto a larger piece of construction paper where they can be pieced together as a scene.

Parents, for those of you who have children learning to hold the marker with their fingertips, you can prop up the case on a slightly inclined surface like a two inch three ring binder to help you child’s hand, wrist and forearm placement to gain more control of the marker when drawing and tracing.

I received the Griffin LightBoard case free to facilitate a review. The opinions in this post are my own. For more information on Griffin Technology and their review process, check out http://bit.ly/griffinreview

February 14, 2010 - New York, NY - Toy Story toy soliders decsend from the ceiling at the Toy Story 3 event at Toy Fair 2010

February 14, 2010 - New York, NY - Toy Story 3 event at Toy Fair 2010 John Lasseter holds a lego replica of himself

February 14, 2010 - New York, NY - Toy Story 3 event at Toy Fair 2010 John Lasseter poses next to lego replica of himself

February 14, 2010 - New York, NY - John Ratzenberger poses with Keri WIlmot from www.toyqueen.com at the Disney preview of Toy Story 3 in New York City

February 14, 2010 - New York, NY - John Lasseter poses with Keri WIlmot from www.toyqueen.com at the Disney preview of Toy Story 3 in New York City

February 14, 2010 - New York, NY - Keri WIlmot from www.toyqueen.com at the Disney preview of Toy Story 3 in New York City gets shown some of the new toys for 2010 by one of the Disney executives