Week 12 Explain Everything

This week I explored Explain Everything which is a site designed to make learning more engaging and impactful.    

In Explain Everything, teachers can upload worksheets that they already use in their classroom and manipulate them so that they can be interactive and used digitally.   This site lends itself to collaboration as it allows students to work together on a project, whiteboard or worksheet from virtually anywhere.  

Teachers can also create their own custom assignments for students.  Teachers can record and upload videos of themselves presenting material that they uploaded to enhance a lesson for remote learning. Teachers can also use Explain Everything as a virtual whiteboard as they can upload an image and draw on the image.  These graphics can be uploaded onto YouTube and shared with students and other teachers.  

I appreciate that there are many tutorials on the website to teach users how to best use Explain Everything.  They also offer newsletters sent to your inbox for additional tips and tricks.   

There is a free version which allows teachers to have up to 3 projects at a time, 1 slide per project, and each video must be 3 minutes or shorter.  However, for $34.99 a year, teachers have more flexibility in video length, and they can have unlimited projects.  This price is per teacher.    

Explain Everything is a phenomenal tool for virtual learning.  The way teachers can record a video and present an interactive lesson makes students feel like they are right there with the teacher.   I am certain this was very useful during the pandemic.  In addition, the collaboration aspect is wonderful as it allows students in different classes or even students learning from home to work on projects together.  However, for in person learning, having the teacher in front of a classroom explaining the material is more impactful than watching the teacher on a screen.   Face to face learning and collaboration is best.  There is definitely a need for Explain Everything and I would definitely use it if I needed to teach virtually.   

Class Hook Week 11

Today I reviewed a website called Class Hook.  Class Hook is a website with educational videos 1-5 minutes long aimed at prompt educational discussions among students.  The benefits of using Class Hook compared to YouTube is that they are already vetted to ensure that the video is safe to show to students and engaging. Class Hook arranges videos by grade, standard and topic which is another benefit compared to finding videos on YouTube.   

Class Hook is used as an anticipatory set to hook students when starting a lesson.  Students will become engaged and ready to learn something new.  After watching the short videos, students will have the opportunity to discuss the topic.  Teachers can also assign assignments after watching the videos.  

Depending on the plan, some videos may show advertising so teachers should be aware of this.   However, this is a great way to teach students about media literacy.  The ad free plan is $8 a month and unlimited videos.  The free version only allows for 10 videos a month.  It’s not very expensive, however, there may be other free or more affordable options.   

Class Hook can be a great resource for teachers who want the ease of searching for a video on a certain topic, standard or grade level.  However, I do not believe it should be the only resource for engaging videos to hook students.  It would be a great supplement to YouTube or other sites that offer quality educational videos.