App of the Week: Explain Everything

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Name: Explain Everything
Platform: iPad
Cost: $2.99

For several months I’ve been looking for an iPad screencasting app. Then one day I read a blog post about three apps that were supposed to be screencasting apps – ScreenChomp, ShowMe, and Explain Everything. While I wouldn’t call any of these apps traditional screencating apps – they don’t enable the user to make movies of movements on a screen – I would say that the features of Explain Everything are close to what is traditionally considered screencasting.

Explain Everything is a way to make narrated slideshow movies on an iPad. Users can import the images for their movie from their iPad photo roll or camera, from Evernote, or from Dropbox. Images and text can be moved around on a screen, text can be added to any slide, drawing tools can be used to add features to slides – including arrows and shapes. The example below shows how an idea for a story might be storyboarded using Explain Everything.

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Reporting On YALSA’s Online Class: Connect, Create, Collaborate

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Over the past several weeks I’ve been teaching an online course for YALSA called Connect, Create, Collaborate. The focus of the course is on technology in teen services with a strong focus on how to integrate technology into traditional programs and services for teens – collection development, programming, outreach, readers’ advisory, and so on. Over the past five weeks students in the class have been creating lots of content in order to explore the possibilities.

Here’s a rundown on some of the topics covered in the course and what was discussed about and/or developed each week:

QR Codes

During the week that focused on how to create great teen services using tech, one of the topics discussed was QR codes. The QR code conversation brought out a lot of great ideas including ideas about adding codes to: Read More →