A while ago, while looking for an interesting way to teach students about fractals, I came across this amazing video.
It was made by the very talented Vi Hart, a 'recreational mathemusician' of agnostic gender who has worked for/with the Khan Academy as well as being an academic in her own right. Videos on the Vi Hart channel cover a lot of high school and university maths concepts, but they're built from the basics, and often revolve around easily accessible/visible/constructible more advanced concepts. My students may not understand all the mathematical theory in the videos on the Vihart channel, but they recognise the representations of concepts like hexaflexagons and infinity trees and how they fit (at a very basic level) with what they're learning in primary school.
The video above is still their favourite, though! We had a table filling up pinecones, flowers, weird seedpods and photos of vegetables and fruit from home after watching it.
If you're looking for a way to capture your students' attention (particularly your bright little buttons!) and get them wanting to explore the maths they're learning in class more deeply, or in ways they can see and touch in the world around them, Vi Hart is a phenomenal hook, line and sinker. You can also check out Vi's website here and follow Vi's Twitter feed here.
So this year was the year of the great e-portfolio shift in my pedagogy. I've used them for the last three years, but this year, I've been able to embed it much more holistically into my classroom program as we've had all four members of our level team on board to develop, trial, review and assess elements of the platform.
I'll do a post on our platform - EduPLEX by OzInterbiz - another time, but today I want to share a Web 2.0/3.0 tool I was encouraged to become familiar with by our outsource instructor, George Sorgi. We had a lot of instructional videos at our fingertips to embed into our portfolio artifact pages, but not one for a graphic manipulation tool we wanted to use, so George suggested I make one. I had seen my Virtual Teacher instructors on Coursera use software where they could play their presentation and talk to it, recording it for us to stream later, and they had briefly mentioned that it would be useful for us to learn to use said software, but they'd never gone into much detail about what to use, or how to go about making a good video.
Screencast-o-matic has a free online version of its software that you can use for just such a purpose! Prepare your presentation by whatever method you like, then load up Screencast-o-matic, and talk to it while you record - voila! Well, not quite voila - it took me nearly two hours to make my first, very short video. Since then, I've become a bit more streamlined in how I go about making videos - I make a running sheet of what I need to cover (usually in point form on the back of an envelope!), practice once and then record. I try to make sure I'm ready to record it in the evening, as the mic picks up background sound very easily (as you'll hear in my example below!).
Feedback I've had from my students has been positive! It took a few of them a little bit before they paused it, took off their headphones and, looking at me with big eyes, asked "Ang, is that YOU??" as they are used to hearing George or one of the other instructors on the videos. It's been a great tool for testing whether they can extrapolate instructions about one task and apply it to another, too, as the examples in the videos are showing how to use functions on the tools, not complete the artifacts themselves.
This was my first Screencast-o-matic video, explaining how to create a graphic using SketchPad. Enjoy!
Some, only scratching the surface of the site, may look at it and say it's just a collection of links to classroom blogs - but it is SO much more than that. It is a platform from which teachers can draw inspiration, view best blogging practice in action, connect with like-minded educators, and connect their classes with like-minded students. It is an opportunity to showcase student work and receive feedback from others around the world, and an opportunity for students to learn about giving useful, academic feedback, and engage in cyber-savvy discussion about how to improve their own work.
There's no cost involved, and every blog is manually entered by the creators, who touch base with you afterwards to make sure you know your blog entry has gone live. Submitting your class blog URL, in my mind, is the ideal next-step for an educator who has got the hang of posting meaningful, relevant content - and now wants to broaden their audience.
Some interesting notes - while some educators still use Blogger/Blogspot (like I do), many are using Global2 (attached to vic.edu.au). Many choose to include photos of students, featuring identifying data (school logo, etc.), which I don't. Many have students contributing but not moderating (also my practice). The entries act as an excellent tool to encourage reflection!
