MKA's Director of Ed Tech Designs App with World-Wide Following

Congratulations to MKA’s Director of Educational Technology Reshan Richards for designing an iPad app that is impacting teaching and learning. In the nine months since its launch, it has attracted more than 40,000 users worldwide.

Explain Everything grew from Richards’ ongoing doctoral research at Columbia University on how qualitative formative assessment can be leveraged by mobile technologies. In essence, the app captures anything a teacher or student says, draws, or moves in a video format that uses screen casting technology. The app features a highly flexible combination of import and export features that let users work with Office and iWork files, photos, videos and audio and services such as Dropbox, Box, Evernote, and iBooks.

Richards was inspired to create the app after his classroom work as a math teacher revealed how much more of a student’s thought processes were displayed when they took screencasts of the progress of their work, rather than simply presenting their solution to a math problem on paper.

Explain Everything, popularized through Twitter and educational blogs, is now being used by schools, educators, and students in places like Australia, Finland, United Arab Emirates, Sweden, The United Kingdom, and the United States. Richards ascribes much of the app's success to the fact that, unlike the majority of educational iPad apps, Explain Everything is an open-ended tool rather than a content-delivery application.