Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Educreations in the Math Classroom to Capture Mathematical Thinking

This summer we were chatting about our favourite digital tools on Twitter and sharing some tools we would like to explore this upcoming year.  For my #Peel21st blog hop post, I wanted to talk about finally breaking through with Educreations.

The screen capture apps are well-known, as is the Educreations vs. Explain Everything debate (both have their pros and cons). I also know you can produce beautiful finished products with screen cap apps, but that's not what I want to talk about. I do think screen cap apps are a new text form all to themselves, but that is a subject for another post.

Pattern Clip

In the sample above, not much more happens than a short discussion of a pattern they built, but you can see and hear their thinking about patterns start to develop. Educreations work can be messy, and "in the moment ", and that's what we want in the math classroom. I have seen students who own the app use it as a sort of notebook, capturing thinking on the spot, even taking a photo of a textbook page and drawing all over it.

Here's another video.

Pattern #2

At this point you know we haven't developed long lists of criteria or a learning goal yet. We are still playing.

The inquiry cycle I prefer is this:
-play with the math
-look at what we did (in this case we watched about 12 pattern Educreations)
-bring out common misconceptions
-do mini-lessons as needed (on finding a rule from t-table, or graphing a pattern, e.g.)
-look at more and different types of patterns (not just blocks)
-develop criteria for the assessments we will use

Third very unique pattern

What I am saying here is that I like screen cap apps more for "in the middle" assessments than for summatives. You want conversations and observations all in one app? You got it! Evidence of mathematical thinking? Sure.  I think screen cap apps could be one of the most powerful assessment tools we have.

Puppet Pals by Debbie Axiak http://debbieaxiak.blogspot.ca/ ​
IFTTT by Jason Richea
Notability by Phil Young http://wp.me/p3RGo2-1Jb

1 comment:

  1. Great post and interesting examples of Educreations. I think one of the strengths of this app is that there is an integrated online sharing mechanism for created vids as part of the design. I don't think this is always exploited as much as it could be. Thanks for posting and sharing.

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