Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you doing this fine day?
Me?
I’m somewhat anxious, if the truth be known.
I’m anxious because I’m about to show you a very deep piece of software which on
the surface might not look quite as deep as it is and I want to do a good job because
I think it’s a really amazing tool.
I’m also somewhat confused because I’m trying to figure out how this piece of software
has escaped my notice until now.
So today, I am somewhat anxious and confused.
Why?
I will explain everything today on DottoTech.
Let us together look at Explain Everything.
Now this is a mobile app that will work in iOS, Android and Windows mobile platforms.
The publishers really are focusing this product on the education market, which is I think
the reason why it has slipped by my notice.
Explain Everything is a drawing and annotating tool that uses a whiteboard but allows us
to bring other elements in and it also records whatever it is you’re drawing or creating
as a video, as a screencast of its own, if you choose to do that so it’s got some really
cool educational functionality.
It also has some use for all sorts of other types of communications.
You will see as soon as we dive into it.
The other thing about is, I think one of the reasons why it slipped my notice is its price.
I think it’s like $3.95 to purchase it, far and away one of the best values I’ve
ever seen in software in my life.
So why don’t we just dive into it?
Let’s take a look.
I’ve got it running right now on my older iPad.
You can see right here, it’s Explain Everything.
For this demo, I’m using a Jot pen.
This is a pen that has a much more refined nib than you would get from your finger or
one of the soft-tipped pens.
There are a variety of different styluses available to you.
This iPad that I have is not pressure-sensitive or anything like that so it’s just going
to work kind of as a basic pen but it does give me a little bit more precision.
I quite like having it.
So let’s dive in to Explain Everything and have a look.
Basically, if you think about it as a slideshow creator, it’s like a PowerPoint or Persuasion
where you create a series of slides but each of those slides, you can create drawings,
annotations, other things upon and like a slideshow tool, you can import other elements
into it.
But the difference is it will actually record what you’re doing in real time, which is
very cool and I’ll show you in a moment.
Just at the beginning they just kind of give you some colored templates which are the preset
colors of pens, etc., but as you look at it, you realize right away we’re in a graphics
applications.
We’ve got our pen tool.
You’ve got a text tool and you’re going to recognize what most of the tools down the
side bar are going to do for you.
The unique area is the area right down at the very bottom of the screen where we see
a video controller with a red center button there.
We can actually start and record everything that we’re doing.
So let me explain one of the purposes of this.
Why would you want to do this?
Well obviously, if you’re doing a sales presentation or something like that and you’re
drawing or you’re creating a graphic, that would be a nice thing to be able to record.
But in the educational space, if a student has an iPad or a similar mobile device and
they are working on a math problem and working through it, they can actually record their
thoughts as they go along and it will access the other media tools within the device.
It will record their voiceover as they’re drawing, for instance, so that they can work
out an equation and then the teacher can play the recording back and see the process that
they went through.
So here we see some really profound educational applications to it.
But for you and I, right now I’m just going to select the black pen tool right there.
I’m going to select the type and the width of the pen tip that I want.
Of course, you can choose a soft tip or a hard tip.
So you’ve got some nice basic graphic tools.
Once you’ve got that, I now have the ability to draw on the screen.
Now if I choose to hit the Record button at the bottom, it’s now actually recording
not just my pen strokes but it’s also recording everything—isn’t my handwriting good?—I
am saying.
And if I stop this now, I now have a little video recording which is just if you look
down, slide 1 of 1, so I can create multiple sessions right while I’m doing this all
at once and I can hit Play.
Actually, let me turn up the volume here so you can hear.
I’m not sure if you’ll be able to hear that very well.
So there we go.
But it’s recording everything as we go along.
This just causes my mind to go off like fireworks, imagining different potential for this in
the style of videos that I produce here on my channel, for sales and marketing, for training
as well as education, all of this in an app that’s $3.95.
Now we can now take this, if we look at the bottom section over here at the right-hand
side, we have a variety of exporting tools that will allow us to take and send the content
out to video and store it in Dropbox in other areas as well.
Plus, we also have the ability where we can import existing video or images and we can
import them onto the page that we’re working with and real video can actually be running
while you’re annotating over the top of it.
So imagine this.
If you’re a golf instructor, you could videotape your student.
You could bring the video in to explain everything and you could be annotating over top and drawing
over top of the person taking their golf swing and describing to them exactly what they’re
doing wrong and create a video completely annotating like the old telestrators that
they used to have in television.
They also have the ability to do that just with simple graphics.
Pretty much anything that we can see on our computer screen, we can bring into explain
everything and then we can work with it and we can add annotation over top and create
a video with it before we’re all set and done.
Is that not a very cool app?
As I say, I’m kind of chagrined at the fact that it’s been out for a long time.
It’s a very mature product and I’ve yet to know anything about it and to include it
here on the channel.
But that now has been dealt with.
We’ve now got our first video on Explain Everything, a way cool app.
For education, it’s definitely off the charts but in so many other areas as well.
I hope you found this video today to be useful, engaging and entertaining.
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That’s it for today.
Till next time, I am Steve Dotto.
Have fun storming the castle!