Tech Tool of the Week: Explain Everything

Explain Everything is a screen recording app for iPads that lets you turn your iPad into your very own interactive whiteboard.  Write or draw and explain as you go, and the app will record your voice and movements and create a video!  You can either write on a blank screen or import pictures and annotate them.  In addition, you can enter text and shapes.  At the end, you will have a video that you could email to a student or post on Veracross.  If you've ever heard of Khan Academy, this is a way to create videos just like the ones you would find there!  


What could you do with Explain Everything?  How about using it as an assessment tool to determine whether students understand a concept?  You could put them in groups and ask them to write a script for a video in which they explain a concept they learned in class.  They could then create the video and email it to you for evaluation.


Another idea would be to use Explain Everything to create your own videos explaining concepts you taught in class.  You could then post these videos on Veracross for your students to access.  For students who have difficulty grasping a concept the first time it is taught, this could be a great way to give them another opportunity to learn the material.


Here are two examples of ways that our own faculty members have used Explain Everything in their classes!  One is a video created by Mark Churchill's 6th grade math students explaining a math concept.  The second is a video created by middle school students that gives directions around San Francisco in Chinese.