Explain Everything is an iPad app for making teaching videos quickly and easily.  The interface consists of a blank canvas,  annotation tools and a record/pause/play button.  As soon as you hit the record button, the application screencasts the notes and drawings that you make on the canvas whilst recording your audio narration.  If a mistake is made or you want to change something about your screencast, it’s easy to go back and rewrite what you’ve recorded.

For teachers, the application can be used to record beforehand the explanation of a difficult concept – the combination of readymade sound, images and animated notes put together in a concise video serves to capture students’ attention and can be used for flipped learning.

Below are some examples of how I’ve used this application to create short tutorial videos on the topic of binary, decimal and hexadecimal conversions:

Even more useful still, is to have students make their own videos.  This enables you, the teacher, to quickly identify any misconceptions that a student has about a particular topic.  As an assessment tool, asking students to make their own tutorial videos can be invaluable for giving you a clear insight into their knowledge, skills and understanding.  At the same time, students become much more involved in their own learning process by making a tutorial video.

What is an operating system?

The operating system is a fundamental piece of software that runs in the background of a computer system to manage many of its basic functions.  Without the operating system, most computers would be very user-unfriendly and most users would find it almost impossible to work with computers on a day-to-day basis.

What does the operating system do?

In addition to providing the user-friendly interface that allows the user to communicate with the computer, the operating system manages all of the computer’s software and hardware, as well as its memory and processes.  Most of the time for example, there are several different computer programs running at the same time, and they all need access to the computer’s central processing unit (CPU), memory and storage.  The operating system coordinates all of these tasks to make sure that each program runs properly.

The most common operating systems include:

– Microsoft Windows

– Mac OS X

– Linux

– Android

– iOS

These operating systems generally come pre-loaded on the computers they are designed for.  As with all modern operating systems, they use a graphical user interface, or GUI (pronounce “gooey”).  This means that the screen displays a user interface made up of graphics and text, which includes clickable icons, buttons and menu options.