Teaching with (Digital) Video

So this is the first of my concept albums that I spoke of in my previous post. This one is titled Integrating Video into the Mathematics Classroom and will consist of 6 songs. This album kicks off a new direction for the Future of Mathematics. I’m not going to be writing so much about the events of my classroom, but more about the world of math and how it is affected by new technologies.

Introduction - Our classrooms are populated with students whose learning styles vary greatly. Some are visual, others auditory, and still others kinesthetic. Therefore, if our goal is to reach every learner in our classrooms, we must see to it that we are incorporating activities that reach the diverse learning styles of our students. This type of effort must not be ignored in the math classroom in particular, where students are often bombarded with worksheets and problems from the textbook.

One way to promote learning for multiple learning styles is through the use of video. By bringing sound, animation, and interactivity to learning, streaming video, Flash movies, and digital video editing software allow students to experience concepts in new ways. Open a textbook or hand out a worksheet and all you offer your students is a static image of the concept on a piece of paper. Take the concept of transformations, for instance. In a textbook, students only see the before and after versions of the transformation. However, with a Flash movie, students can see the transformation actually take place.

This album will focus on the use of video--digital,streaming, and Flash movies--to improve student learning in the mathematics classroom. Below, and in future posts, you will find curriculum integration ideas, links with more information, information on the best products for integrating video, and more. Enjoy!

Articles -

• Video on Demand Boosts Students' Math Scores - (eSchoolNews Online)

  "Short video clips that reinforce key concepts are effective in increasing student achievement, according to a second research project. An earlier study found that video can improve learning in science and social studies. Now, brand-new research shows judiciously selected video clips also can produce statistically significant gains in algebra and geometry scores."

• Macromedia Flash as a Tool for Mathematics Teaching and Learning - (School Science and Mathematics)

  "Macromedia Flash is a powerful and robust development tool. Because of its graphical, sound, and animation capabilities (and ubiquitous browserplug-in), major companies employ it in their website development (see www.nike.com or www.espn.com). These same features also make Flash a valuable environment for building multi-representational "movies" (a Flash term analogous to "applet" in Java) to illustrate mathematical ideas or simulate mathematical situations."

Products -

• BrainPop.com is a large library of short educational movies created with Flash animation. Topics from all subject areas are described by young Tim and his robot friend, Moby, in often humorous ways. These jokers demonstrate difficult subject matter like scale drawing in real life situations, which helps students who are having difficult time understanding these concepts from traditional instruction.
  

• iMovieHD - iMovie allows your students to capture, edit, and enhance their own curriculum-based movies. Incredibly simple to use, it also allows them to combine all of their materials and research, including: photos, images and video from the Internet, scanned images, audio files, and their own narration. If your district uses Apple computers, iMovie is definitely worth looking into.
• - Pinncale Studio 9 is similar to iMovie--your students can easily capture, edit, and enhance video with it--but is only available on the Windows platform.
  
• unitedstreaming - "unitedstreaming is a digital video-on-demand service brought to you by Discovery Education."

That's it for song number one for Teaching with (Digital) Video. Later this week I'll post the songs Curriculum Integration Ideas, From the Classroom, & (Digital) Video Links.