If I could only have one app - Explain Everything

If I could have only one app to use in the classroom, it would be Explain Everything, available for $2.99 from the app store.  This was the first paid app that we downloaded in our class, it has been worth every penny for the students, and I suspect that we have just started to see its potential as teachers, especially now that version 2 has been released.

If you are not familiar with Explain Everything, it is a general purpose tool that is both an interactive whiteboard and a way to create screencasts.  A teacher or student can annotate or narrate lessons or presentations in multiple ways.  These lessons or presentations can then be saved to the camera roll (important in our case so we can import it to Edmodo) or to Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, WedDav, mail, or as a video file.  It is an extremely versatile app.

I was initially reluctant to pay for a screencasting app because there are free options available. We did our first screencasting project using the free Educreations app on a teacher recommendation.  However, our students were frustrated because they could not edit their recordings and I was frustrated because there was no way to save their projects to the iPad camera roll.  Money is often an issue in schools and there are other tools similar to Explain Everything.  There is a comparison chart created by Jac de Haan a year ago here. 

For the educational bang for the buck though, Explain Everything is one app worth paying for because of its versatility.  It can be used in any classroom, with any subject.  What follows is only a tiny sampling of ideas for student use.  Our students will be doing more with the app next year and I anticipate using it more, as a teacher, for lesson preparation and to provide make-up and specialized lessons for students who have missed class, or need lessons explained in a different way than the one I used for the whole class.

Math ideas:

Students can use it to explain their mathematical thinking to each other.  Earlier in the year, students were struggling to remember the rules of divisibility and we were struggling with a way to motivate them to want to remember them.  We decided to have them work in pairs to create screencasts of the rules for future students.  The students had to learn the rules well in order to explain them.  When they had trouble explaining them, we as teachers could easily look at their screencasts and see what students were not understanding because they had recorded their thought processes for us. This lesson exceeded our expectations.

Students can be assessed on their mathematical thinking.  Students can be given a math problem and asked to provide multiple ways of solving it.  These assessments are much more valuable and thorough with student explanations included.

Language Arts

Students can be assessed on their reading fluency.  A teacher can import a screenshot of a piece of text for a student to read.  The student can then record himself reading it.  Our students have wanted to re-read text multiple times when they have had the opportunity to hear themselves read.  These recordings can be saved throughout the year and compared. 

Reading groups.  Students can record their collaborative thoughts after reading and re-reading texts in class.  This could be in the form of reflecting on theme, mood or author's point of view by discussing words used or by excerpting supporting materials from the text (perhaps by taking photos of highlighted portions of the text). 

Students can create digital stories.  If you saw my last post, you saw some of the digital stories the students created using Explain Everything.  We have only begun to explore the possibilities with language arts.

Using the app

Rather than try to explain the app myself, here is a great video that highlights most of the key features.

                                   
                                        Video courtesy of Digital First Ohio State

Additional Explain Everything Resources:
Excellent archived Explain Everything session presented by its developer, a former math teacher, at EdTechTeacher. If you have not tried out this resource, I highly recommend it.
Associated list of resources and videos here.

Our first few 4-image stories are done!

As promised, here are the first few 4-image stories that the students have created using the Explain Everything screencasting app.  These are "first run" stories, with no editing. We have all learned quite a lot together and overall, the stories are quite delightful.  They should serve their purpose of providing a fun way to remember a moment in time.

Since students have posted their stories to Edmodo, they are now in the process of viewing each others' stories as "critics" to see what has worked well and what things perhaps did not work so well.  They are taking notes to keep in their iPad folders so that they can refer to them when they are working on their next projects. 

The notes are thoughtful and I have overheard many compliments --  about fluency of recordings,  about the ability to center drawings so that the desk doesn't show in the background, about telling a good story, about colorful illustrations, and about story topics.  I have seen lots of heads nodding and consulting with each other - questions asked about "how did you do that?"  There has been a lot of positive energy in the classroom, and as usual, most of the students have not wanted to go to recess, but have wanted to stay in and work with their iPads.

                                         
Jannah's story

Joely's story

Josue'story

J.W.'s story

Noor's story

Sean S.'s story

Sofia's story

Our 4 image stories -- the process

As many of you know, I am taking a fantastic ETMOOC  course with about 1,000 other (mostly) educators from around the world who are interested in technology.   Inspired by all the Digital Storytelling that I'm seeing from my fellow ETMOOCers, I was ready for our students to create their own "4 image stories."  This lesson is somewhat based on the "5 photo story" I first heard about from Wes Fryer on his website.

Before we started this project, we had been reading memoirs and talking about why their authors would pick to tell their tales.  For this 4 image story, students picked one memorable moment from their lives that they thought they would want to remember years from now.  They might pick the story everyone always told about the funny uncle, or the story about the time when everyone ended up eating sandwiches for Thanksgiving dinner.  The story just had to be about something that was important to them.

The students first wrote their memories down in story form, then they were asked to imagine how they would illustrate that story with only 4 images.  This wasn't easy.  Students had to consider which parts of the story were most important and they had to carefully consider the story sequence.  There were many "redos."  After everyone had quickly drafted some ideas on paper, they were given art paper to draw the 4 images for the project.

Once the drawings/images were finished, the students used our first paid app (thanks to all of you who donated to Walk With Pride!), Explain Everything, to import their images into a continuous story.  The images were imported via the camera roll, then students added a minimal amount of text to each image and audio of themselves reading the text. 

Here are some pictures of the process:

Mapping out a rough draft of the 4 images

 

Drawing the final 4 images

Getting ready to take photos of the images for Explain Everything.

Adding text.

Recording audio.

Sharing what we created.

About half of the class has finished their projects already and they are very excited about their work, if a little uncomfortable hearing their own voices in the recordings!  I hope to post their stories soon, so stay tuned!