Great opportunity to extend student learning and ask students to "show what they know."
Community Review for Explain Everything
My Take
Explain Everything is a great tool to use in any subject in the classroom. It allows the student or teacher to create essentially a slideshow complete with images, drawings, text, and narration. I love how easy it is to create videos and how simple (and free) it is to share or export the videos as well. This app serves kids because it pushes them to extend their learning through explaining concepts that we have covered in class or through creating something to show what they know about a concept. Students can share these videos with others. I also upload the videos to our classroom website, where students can access them for reference. This app also helps my teaching because it offers a form of formative assessment. I can use the student created videos to adapt my lesson plans for future learning.
How I Use It
I like to use this app when asking students to explain a concept including their reasoning and questions. I will often times use it at the end of a lesson to check for understanding and deeper comprehension. For example, we recently learned about using parentheses in math, so the students were assigned a "quickfire." They were given 20 minutes to create a video explaining the importance and significance of parentheses in math. Students had to know the concept, be able to explain it to others, know the technology and how to manipulate it, plan out their video, and create original number models.