Our First Student Mathcast!

I'm excited about the potential of students creating simple, short videos where they explain and teach concepts that they are exploring. I've always believed that the best way to learn something is to teach it and that we should use instructional design that puts students in the role of the teacher as much as possible. This is our very first screencast created by our sixth grade students and we think it will provide a nice launching base for other mathcasts in the future. This video is posted over YouTube and it is also posted at the class wiki, which is currently is only visible to the sixth grade students. A few students have already commented on the video-this is where things will get interesting as the students engage in collaborative knowledge building to help with their understanding.

A special thank you is in order to Eric Marcos and his sixth grade mathcasters at MathTrain.TV for their pioneering work in this area. We shared some of Mr. Macos' student mathcasts with our students to help inspire their thinking.

On the tech side, the three students authored their slides in the google docs presentation tool and we recorded and edited their 'cast using Screenflow.