Explain Everything for Chrome

Taken from: http://explaineverything.com/news/explain-everything-chromebooks/

Explain Everything has been a popular iPad app for several years now. Students and teachers love it because of the flexibility of the tool. You can import pictures, videos, and websites all while recording your voice and drawing/typing over these items. Users can also pause, create another slide, and then continue their recording. Explain Everything gives students a lot of opportunity to express their learning in a fun and creative manner.

Recently Explain Everything was added to the Chrome Webstore. Students in school districts with Chromebook initiatives can now take advantage of the recording power within this tool. Right now it is free. How long that will last I do not know as the iPad app does cost money.

The video below features how to create a video using Explain Everything. I do not cover every tool that is available for the sake of time. However, it should give you and your students enough information to get started. There is a bit of a learning curve with this tool. I recommend having students just test it out to see what all the functions are within this tool.

(Just for fun, you can access the video I made during this screencast over Explain Everything here.)

I envision students being able to use Explain Everything in a variety of ways:

• Students could use it to create animations. They could import images of characters from the internet or even drawn. They could then grab the images and record their voice. 
• Students could also use this for full presentations. If they made the slides with a photo editor (Pic Monkey) or Google Slides, they could use images on each page within Explain Everything. Then finish by recording their voice over the slides. These videos could be shared with the whole class instead of having all students go to the front of the class to present. This would save valuable time in the long run if you treat it more like a gallery of presentations instead of sitting through each presentation separately. 
• Students could import maps or other various images to explain a specific event or series of events in history. In a sense, it could be a digital timeline. 
• Use Explain Everything to screencast the whole problem solving process in math. Post an image of the problem and work it out while speaking aloud. Students could also share these videos out to help support learning with their classmates. 
• Digital storytelling is popular among elementary students. Students could take pictures of the pages of books and record themselves reading the text aloud. This would encourage students to focus on their intonation and fluency. I'm sure there are some primary elementary teachers that would love for older grade levels to share these videos with their young students. 

I'm anxious for students to try out this tool. If you are a teacher at MSDSC, please send a few samples my way. I'd love to see the results! 

Update:
I went back to the description of Explain Everything. As it turns out, the download is for a 30-day free trial. Here is the description: