Whenever I can make it work, I like to give my students one class period to review prior to an exam. As we have an exam on factoring tomorrow, my Math 20 students were working on a review today. Inspired by some of the discussions around connectivism and collaboration I have been around lately, I decided to do a bit of small scale social learning (just within my own classroom walls).
I gave my students their review handout, as per usual. They had the first 5 minutes of the class to get themselves going on the review, after which I would randomly call a student to come and do the question on the SmartBoard. These were all recorded using Jing, and then tossed up to the course wiki. The compilation of questions is here.
The reaction of the students was quite something. I had already modeled how to record examples for the wiki in previous classes, so they already knew how it worked. It was just a matter of taking some time in class to let them go at it. Some students were instantly excited, and wanted to record as many questions as possible. All of the students enjoyed the fact that they had time to work through the question on their own first, and then record how they did the question. A number of the students were nervous about making a mistake on the recording, and therefore would ask their neighbor/me whether they had done it right prior to recording. One student was so paralyzed by fear of making a mistake that she asked me quietly if I would not call on her (this was a student with a fairly high average — 75%+).
Speaking of mistakes, I don’t know how to best record examples of them. I don’t want the student to feel belittled by posting something incorrect and labeling it as such, but there seems to be so much potential learning in taking a mistake and discovering how it can be fixed. This is easily done in class, but really hard to show on Jing (of particular difficulty is the 5 minute time limit, which doesn’t allow too much exploration of “what went wrong”). Any ideas?
In the end, this wasn’t too much different than the normal review period. However, I certainly saw a drastic increase in student engagement, and a bunch of students left talking about how they would be watching themselves/each other online tonight. Really, if I’m getting them to voluntarily watch math videos, I’ve got to think something’s going right!
Great modelling Dan.
It will be interesting to see if it makes a difference in their test scores.
Comment by roadrunner — February 15, 2008 @ 9:43 pm |
It seems that when we incorporate technology into our classroom we do a better job of engaging our students. I love that the students were talking about checking about math videos at home. That is so cool!
Comment by kibrown — February 16, 2008 @ 5:30 pm |
Sounds cool. I found a link on http://www.screencast.com and it gave quite a bit of information on how to make a proper screencast. If you did by the book, it would take some time, as all video production does
Comment by Dave Bircher — February 18, 2008 @ 8:04 pm |
Sounds like your students really got into this Dan. If the 5 min Jing limits you, maybe try another program. I know you can get Camtasia 3 download free now, but haven’t used it myself. http://www.thefreebiesblog.com/2007/11/22/camtasia-studio-313-free/
Comment by Kyle Lichtenwald — February 20, 2008 @ 1:15 pm |
Powerful social tool. make a careless mistake yourself, no biggie, but do one in front of the class….biggie.
Comment by Shaun Loeppky — February 24, 2008 @ 11:25 pm |
This is very intriguing to me. This post has made me want to have to experiment with Jing and wikis. I have just begun to use a blog with my grade 10 precals this semester. I was going to ask if this improved the average on the test, but then I remembered that more engaged students = more learning = better averages!
Comment by CdnMathTeacher — February 29, 2008 @ 11:44 am |