Creating in the Classroom

In our digital world there are so many excellent creation tools available to teachers and students. Ipads and computers in the classroom offer easy access to creative learning experiences, but with so many options how can you know which ones are right for your students? I had the opportunity to build some creative content using an online app designed to make collaboration easy. Check out my review below!

Explain Everything is an online interactive whiteboard. Their website promotes a user friendly experience with the benefit of group collaboration. The interactive interface of the app offers huge potential for amazing collaborative work in the classroom (or workplace) and there are a lot of great features that can help you create content that is engaging and visually dynamic.

Together with a colleague, we created an activity for an elementary Social Studies class. We added a background colour, title, instructions and large image of Canada. During the creation of this page we ran into a number of problems that slowed down our progress and caused frustration. The first issue we encountered was with text boxes, text could easily be added but it was difficult to edit. There were many instances that required us to delete large blocks of text because we could not go back and change it. This was frustrating and discouraging. When we added images to the page we were unable to size them which meant that we spent a lot of time looking for small images that would fit the space we had available. This wasted a lot of time. When we added province names and capital cities to our map of Canada we ran into difficulty sizing the text boxes to fit our space, and when I accidentally moved the image of Canada, the text left holes in the map that I had to carefully realign to get it back to its original place. You can click the image below to see the activity we created, and the finished results of one province.

The app shows a lot of potential for fun collaborative learning experiences and the paid version may offer more features that improve ease of use. However, the trouble with text boxes and time lost when adding images discourages me from recommending the software for classroom use.

#EDTS325, #Explaineverything, #collaborativelearning, #technologyintheclassroom