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Explain Everything
Pros: Detailed editing of recordings. Real-time collaboration. Cloud saves.
Cons: Can't easily switch microphone source. No infinite canvas. Less intuitive than competitors.
Bottom Line: The paid version strikes a perfect balance of features, offering options without going overboard.
Teachers can use Explain Everything to create videos that students can watch, or to give live presentations. It's a tool that works really well in flipped or virtual scenarios, or simply as a backbone for general course info and instructional support. If you're doing a lot of teaching over Zoom or similar apps, make sure to check out the "Interactive Broadcast" scenario, which helps you hook Explain Everything up to a teleconference.
An even more exciting part of this app is helping your students learn to create, present, and share with it -- individually or on group projects. Group projects can be done in-person or remotely thanks to a collaboration feature allowing multiple users to work on one presentation at the same time. At the student level, creating with Explain Everything is probably best for students who know the basics of giving a good presentation and have some familiarity with graphic design tools. Even so, there are a ton of tutorials and learning resources, as well as templates, students can use to gain skills or get started easily.
One thing to consider is importing media and using Explain Everything to explain or annotate it. Teachers could prepare a math assessment where students solve a problem and narrate their thinking. Students could import one of their documents and annotate it, explaining their writing technique. Teachers might also have students use the collaboration features to turn Explain Everything into a brainstorming tool.
Explain Everything Whiteboard is a presentation and whiteboard app available on the web as well as Android, iOS/iPadOS, and Chrome. To start, tap on New Project and choose a blank project screen, select a starter template (including those for learning), or import media (e.g. an image, presentation, or PDF). This brings you to the creation screen with a toolbar on the left side, recording options on the bottom, and sharing/collaboration on the top right. Use the toolbar to design a presentation (incorporating text, shapes, drawings, and media ranging from images to audio to files). Add more slides as necessary. The presentation can be prepped before a recording and then added onto during a recording. You can also pause the presentation while recording to tweak things as you go. There's a movable camera frame to control what gets recorded and robust editing tools to modify the recording before sharing out. Finished projects can can be exported or web links can be created. Projects get saved in the Explain Drive, which provides each user private cloud storage (more with paid subscriptions). Teachers can add students via Google Classroom and they can then log in with their Google accounts.
One unique aspect of Explain Everything is that projects can be placed into three different "scenarios" or modes: open collaboration, presentation, or interactive broadcast. Open collaboration allows multiple people to work on a project, presentation involves one person delivering a presentation to others, and interactive broadcast allows Explain Everything to be integrated into other apps, like teleconference software such as Zoom. Owners of presentations can control who has access, whether other people have editing privileges, and if there's voice chat or not.
Note that the free version of Explain Everything is limited to one project and slide.
Explain Everything Whiteboard is a great platform to combine showcasing content knowledge (through presentations or video creation) with skills building. Students can learn how to present information by mixing and contextualizing media. They'll also need to think through how to structure their presentations or videos to communicate their messages well. Real-time collaboration means students can also learn to balance these needs with how to delegate tasks and ensure consistency and quality. The baked in cloud storage allows students to work on their projects over time. Beyond recording and editing polished presentations and videos, students can also just use Explain Everything as a thinking tool -- leaning into the whiteboard function as a way to brainstorm and structure ideas either alone or in groups. To make all of this easier at a distance, Explain Everything has been smart about building in "scenarios" that tune experiences to virtual presentations vs. collaborative work or in-person presentation.
With a tool like Explain Everything, success depends on the types of features you and your students are looking for/need as well as how skilled everyone is at creation. Among its many competitors, Explain Everything sits in the middle in terms of complexity. It's not a bare bones experience that focuses on quick creation nor is it a platform with un-ending features. It offers a nice blend of both, but will work best with classrooms that have some familiarity with digital creation, particularly graphic design. It's also lacking things here and there that are curious. For instance, it's not clear how to switch microphone inputs and the canvas is locked into one depth vs. the "infinite" canvas of competitors. It's also a tool that requires a paid subscription to use; the free version simply isn't adequate for the vast majority of projects. The good news is that this is a tool that can get weekly use in many classrooms.
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Everything can be done easily.
If you have this application, you have everything you need in the lesson. Preparing presentations, presenting, taking notes, recording presentations, preparing students for presentations, taking videos, etc. Everything can be done easily.
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