Special Guest Post by Rita Sowell, Mathematics Faculty at Vol State
How I Use Explain Everything
Explain Everything is a great interactive whiteboard and screen casting app. It is terrific for making instructional videos to demonstrate a concept. I mainly use this app for answering student math questions for my online students. To create a video I do the following:
- Click on the + sign.
- Choose the background color. (Be careful to have good color contrast for readability.)
- Choose the pencil (2nd item from top on left menu bar) and size of marking.
- Start making your video (don’t forget to talk your way through it) by pressing the red circle (record) at the bottom of the screen.
- Select the blue two vertical parallel bars to stop.
- Select the Export icon (bottom right has arrow pointing upwards).
- Login to your Google account.
- Select Export. The video gets published to my YouTube account.
- After compressing, select Send via Email and a link will be sent to your email address.
- I then send the link out to my students so they can view the video.
Here’s an example of a video I created:
For More Information
Visit the site Explain Everything. (opens in new window)
- Explain Everything costs $3.99 to download the iOS interactive Whiteboard. Premium subscription accounts are available for those who wish.
- Can use on other tablets and smart phones, including Android and Windows 10 tablets, though the iPad version has the most functionality.
- No time limit to your recordings (but best practice is to keep them under 10 minutes).
- Videos can be exported to YouTube, Vimeo, or the Explain Everything Discover site (requires account sign up).
- Doesn’t always play nice with PowerPoint files; you’re better off converting PPT slides to PDF before recording with Explain Everything.
- Don’t forget about captioning! For videos available to all students in a course, closed captions are required and can be added in YouTube or through the Vol State Media Production Services department.