final project

I had students work in groups of 2 or 3 to work out complex composite area problems. In years past, I would give them a few minutes in class to work out the problem, and then go up to the SMART Board to present how to find the area. What I found is that students didn't have enough time to prepare, and this lack of preparation made them very nervous about presenting in front of the class. I would usually have to correct their mistakes and teach the problem anyway.

To correct this, I thought it would be a good idea for them to work on the problem outside of class, giving them plenty of time to prepare, and then present the next day. A lot of students would come in unprepared because they didn't have time, or forgot to meet. Once again, I would usually wind up teaching the problems.

This year, I had the groups make a recording of their work using SMART recorder. We spent a day in the computer lab making the videos. This gave students plenty of time to plan out what they were doing. Also, using SMART Recorder allowed them to present their work in a non-stessful setting. If they wanted to press pause to gather themselves, or even start over, they had that option. This made the quality of presentation much better. Each class had 10 problems to present. Each video was anywhere from 2-4 minutes long. We had plenty of time to show all 10 videos. Students took notes from the videos. We could easily replay part of the video if anyone missed something. One of the best parts about this was that the videos were uploaded to the public drive, so that any student could access the videos on their own time using their account. Since I was giving a quiz the next day, I know that many students watched videos of the problems they needed help with.

I think next year I'm going to try having student use Voicethread for this. I think it would be neat for students to create video commentaries on each others presentation. I didn't have a great experience with VoiceThread, but if I work with it a little over the summer, I'm confident that I can figure it out. Great experience!

Click here, and then click on "student composite area video" to see an example