The EdTech team is always on the lookout for ways to enhance learning through technology. The Teaching with Technology series highlights different strategies to engage and encourage participation on Zoom and in-person.
Teaching with technology Explain Everything
What
Explain Everything is a digital whiteboard for creating engaging videos for your students. It has a lot of other interactive features, too, when you’re ready to add to your knowledge.
Why
Create the video as a pre-class assignment that you can use during your live teaching session. Students can watch and re-watch the video as many times as they need. Our analytics show that these Explain Everything videos are some of the most watched videos on E.Flo MD!
How
Contact MedTech and we will get you all set up with an account and training, whether in person or over Zoom. Once you make your video, you can send it to us, and we will put it into Panopto for you.
Who
Faculty who use this tool include Dr. Henry Mroch and Dr. Jonathan Wisor. Read on to see a examples of how they use Explain Everything.
What do you like about Explain Everything?
Recording a lecture with Explain Everything allows me to get every last word correct. Any mistake, hesitancy, or pause can be corrected by editing. So these lectures are far more polished than anything I can pull off live, in real time. And editing also assures that the lecture is efficient, conveying what needs to be conveyed in the minimal amount of time.
Why do you recommend that faculty use it for teaching?
For me, Explain Everything filled a crucial gap. Early on in my teaching at the College of Medicine, it was clear to me that all of the students were just not grasping certain especially complicated concepts.
Also, sometimes when the students ostensibly mastered individual learning objectives, they would not necessarily connect the dots across learning objectives to understand the broader theme of a given learning session. The video lecture format provided by Explain Everything helped me to address this knowledge gap. I used Explain Everything to hammer out the individual learning objectives and link them together into a coherent narrative. So if an instructor has a similar concern where they are facing a similar kind of knowledge gap in their teaching, I would recommend using Explain Everything lectures as the most efficient way to address the gap.
What do you like about Explain Everything?
- Flexibility to fit topics into a unique context.
- Format material in ways that help review a topic.
- I like to draw concepts.
Why do you recommend that faculty use it for teaching?
- It is a good format to leverage out-of-class time to make the classroom experience more fruitful.
- It allows creativity.
- It makes it possible to create short instructional materials to highlight difficult or important points.
Time
Both of our experts agreed that the best way to learn how to use Explain Everything is through trial and error.
They make their slides first either by writing with an Apple Pencil or inserting images that they can draw or write on. Once you make it, you can reuse it!
by the Office of Technology