Thursday, July 30, 2015

My Favorite App...



There are so many apps out in the world that help us to do just about anything that you want to do!  It is truly hard to pick just one, however when I was practicing my flipped classroom with students over the years, there is one app that I wouldn't have been able to do without -- Explain Everything.
Explain Everything works in a very similar way that ShowMe does, but comes with more bells and whistles to make it a teacher's and students' best friend.

Explain Everything allows you to record your writing and speaking in small chunks, so that if you mess up, you don't have to redo your whole video.  It then takes each of those little chunks and stitches them together into one video.  And my absolute favorite part of Explain Everything is how you get your movie.  You can send it to your camera roll, directly to YouTube, or Dropbox, Google Drive (my personal fav), and the list goes on and on.  It will connect to just about any platform that you could be using.

I would offer this as an alternative for formative assessments with students.  I would simply give them an iPad with Explain Everything on it and tell them to show me what they know.  I did learn the hard way that it's good to give a time limit, otherwise you could get an chatty student who makes you a 10 - 20 minute video.  I usually capped it at 5 minutes.  It was a great way to hear in the student's voice of what they actually understood and misconceptions stood out.  You could understand the depth that they knew by how much detail they went into to explain the concept.  Since I only had 5 iPads in my room (we were not 1:1), I had each of them logged into the same Google account and had the students upload their videos into a shared folder, making it easy for me to access and grade.

Even though it's not a free app, at $2.99, it's well worth it.

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