Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Using Explain Everything in the Primary Classroom

Explain everything is a screen casting and interactive whiteboard app that lets you annotate, animate, narrate, import, and export almost anything to and from almost anywhere.  My students can export their video to our dropbox folder to save it, to our youtube channel to share it and to the camera roll to easily upload to their kidblogs all with a touch of a button.  My grade 1/2 students can easily do all of these functions independently.  In my classroom, we are at the point that I let my students choose the app they want to use to show their learning.  We have many great content creation apps to choose from, however my students are choosing the Explain Everything app more often than ever before.  There are many options with the explain everything app that are not offered on many of the other content creation apps we have on our classroom iPads and I think that is one reason they keep coming back to this great app. 

Here are a few ways my students have been using Explain Everything in our classroom:

1.  I have 6 and 7 year old children in my classroom.  At the beginning of grade one, many students cannot write or draw pictures that I can understand without a little bit of an explanation.  For this particular assignment, students completed a worksheet on time, where they needed to use words and or pictures to answer the questions.  I then instructed them to take a picture of the sheet, and explain their work.  They later posted it to their blogs.

2.  During our procedural writing unit, students had to eat a gingerbread cookie, and write about how they ate it.  They then had a partner take pictures of them eating the cookie and recorded themselves reading their procedural writing.

3.  In science, students were asked to show their learning about the water cycle, here is an Explain Everything done by two girls in my class.

4. This fourth example is a grade one student explaining how she counted her buttons in different ways.

There are so many other ways to use this fantastic app, you can now add new or existing video, you are able to annotate video,  and you can change the background and color templates,  We have been playing around with these new options and it makes this app even more appealing to my students.  

I would love to hear how your students are using Explain Everything in your classroom!


  1. Have you every tried the app Ask3? It seems very similar to Explain Everything but free! I use it the same way you are using yours. Ask3 has you set up a class account where students can view and comment on each others posts. Check out our post on featuring Ask3.

  2. Thank you! I plan to share this with teachers tomorrow! We're thrilled to try out the many options available with this app and your videos are great examples of ways it can strengthen learning for students!

  3. Thank you for posting your examples of Explain Everything.

  4. Thank you for these great examples of ways primary students can use Explain Everything.

  5. As a teacher facilitator, I have shown how to use it with deaf kids. They can record their thoughts by writing and singing since they can record the video and place it in a small corner of the screen. All at the same time.

  6. Great ideas to use, very simple and quick. Am thinking how to show arrays for multiplication, how rhyming words work, how to develop a challenge, using similes in fact almost anything that we are learning to do. I have used the app before and it is very versatile. Thank you for your ideas.