Student Created Tutorials in Numeracy

Holiday is over and back in class and this is my first post of the school year. I think it is a nice cross of Numeracy and ICT skills.

Each group has been working on mastering a different strategy in Maths and then developing the ability to explain what they are doing verbally. What is an easy way for the teacher to assess and for the students to show mastery… in pairs create a Kahn Academy style tutorial.

One student records the other working through a problem (this reduces the camera shakiness) then they swap over so each has a problem recorded. Import the clip to iMovie, turn off the videos sound to remove the white noise from the classroom then find a quiet space and record a voice over and publish the movie. The first time that I did it they recorded audio as they worked through the problem, but this distracted them from the equation and made them a bit nervous, but by separating the explanation and the problem it allowed students to focus on the task.

The video below if from a student who is not too confident in Maths, and did record the voice over three times, but by the finished product he was able to clearly explain what he was doing, why he was doing it and had a huge smile on his face – success!

My only wish now is that I was not in China and my students had access to a blog to publish their work on.

Creating a quick Video Tutorial to support Home Learning

I though that I would share this experience from last term as I thought it was a pretty good example of problem solving and a great way to show my students to power of the digital tools they all have at their disposal.

I teach Year 5 and we were using protractors for the first time and some clicked but others took a bit longer to get it. The class asked for some more practice angles to take home so that they could master the skill and that was then end of that.

Later that evening I receive two emails from students saying “I just don’t get it!”. So what do I do, do I leave the kids hanging, email back saying ‘Don’t worry, we’ll go through it tomorrow’? I tell them that if they email me before 8pm I will try to get back to them.

Quick solution – record a quick tutorial on my iPhone and email it to the kids. 5 minutes recording time, 5 minutes editing and voice over and email it to students in a small file format. But, instead of just emailing the kids who asked for help I emailed it to all of them and their parents. Next morning there were many others who needed help, but hadn’t asked, but thanks to the video all kids had completed the task there were several thank you emails from parents and it was all thanks to two kids asking for help and an iPhone.