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Mathcast

I listened to Wes Fryer and Karen Montgomery’s podcast last week, where they spoke about creating online vodcasts as tutorials for solving math problems called Mathcasts. They spoke with Tim Falhberg, the originator of Mathcasts. As VoiceThread is probably the easiest way to post a vodcast, they felt it was the way to get started. What intrigues me is that these online tutorials put students into the role of the teacher working to design the vodcast and produce it for an audience of fellow students. We know what that means for quality learning on the scale of effective learning (i.e., Lecture> Reading> Audio-Visual> Demonstration> Discussion> to the most effective Practice by Doing). With a public audience, we also know it pushes students to do a better job completing and publishing their work.

Here are links to resources to help you learn more about Mathcasts:

Introduction to Mathcasts home page

What a Mathcast looks like

Directory of Mathcasts by grade level

How to get started

Patty O’Flynn shared how she is using Mathcasts with HS students. Check out her blog on Mathcasts.

The Mathcasts I looked at centered around pen and number drawing on the screen with voiceovers. Looking to expand on this, especially with more lateral thinking students, consider challenging students to find other ways to use visuals to teach the skill or concept. I can see storytelling students illustrating their voiceover using cartoon characters dealing with situations involving math. It might be a reach, but for older students, the TV show “Numb3rs” is a big hit that uses math to solve mysteries. They might find themselves as actors in their Mathcast drama! It is all about making connections and applying to new situations to reach a profound understanding with total student engagement.

2 Comments

  1. Tim Fahlberg is a great guy; he actually came to my classroom and got my students and I creating mathcasts back in 2005 and we’ve been making them ever since. We have use the Hitachi Starboard along with Camtasia Studio to create our mathcasts. You can learn more about our mathcast project at http://pattyoflynn.edublogs.org/mathcasts .

  2. lessonslearned

    January 9, 2008 at 10:46 pm

    Thanks Patty. Your blog is now added to my hopeful growing list of Mathcast resources.

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