Personalize Teaching with Explain Everything

By Xiaokai (Katie) Jia

CELT Instructional Consultant/Designer

As teachers in the information age, we have access to abundant teaching resources, including online videos, articles, images, and files in various formats. At the same time, we may struggle putting all those wonderful resources together easily. How great would it be if we could have an infinite canvas to display these resources in one place and use them to explain things in different ways? Oh wait! There is an app for that. It’s called Explain Everything.

Explain Everything is an easy-to-use and interactive whiteboard that allows users to draw, type, annotate, animate, narrate, import, and export almost anything. Today, I would like to share with you some ideas for getting started with this amazing app.

Visual Presentation

With the pen tool, shape tool, and text tool, users can present, highlight, and illustrate new knowledge. Objects can be easily moved, resized, rotated, grouped, and even animated with auto rotation. Teachers can manipulate various objects to explain new concepts, relationships, and procedures. Objects can be texts, drawings, shapes, images, videos, documents, and even web browsers. For instance, teachers and/or their students can record math problem solving procedures on screen with voiceover, also known as a “screencast.”

Personalized Learning

Many teachers value personalized learning and individualized feedback. However, it is often hard to do. With Explain Everything, teachers can create learning materials and easily share them with students before the class. Providing feedback to student projects can be simplified by importing files directly into Explain Everything, recording a screencast, exporting the video, and sharing with students.

Collaboration

Explain Everything projects can be shared with and edited synchronously by multiple users. This means students can view on their own screens what their teacher is doing in real time, and collaborate efficiently on one project with their peers. In addition to student collaboration and engagement, this feature enables students with visual impairment to zoom in to a specific part of the project on their own devices.

For more ideas for integrating Explain Everything into your classroom, check 17 things to do on Explain Everything. If you are interested in learning more about Explain Everything with a CELT consultant, please use the request for services link on the CELT web site.