By Lisa
When considering the benefits of using videos as part of the math curriculum, there are many ways that they can be used in and outside of the classroom and still be educational. The way that I plan to use videos as part of my curriculum this year is to post videos on edublogs as an extra credit assignment for those who want to earn extra credit. Although using videos for classroom work would be great, I will not be able to use them more extensively in the classroom simply because of the time constraints that we have as teachers. In addition, another reason that I will not be assigning videos for my students to watch as homework or to require them to create one on their own is simply that many of my students do not have a computer at home or have access to the equipment that they will need to be successful without allowing them to have a considerable amount of time to complete it. However, when the remodeling is complete at Davis, it is my understanding that every student will have tablets to use and will have access to video assignments whenever they are given. This will be great because I then will have more opportunities to incorporate educational videos in my curriculum when possible.
In order to get the videos viewable that I plan on using for extra credit assignments with my students, I will video the assignments with my tablet and email them to myself so that I will have access to them on my computer. Next, I will upload the videos to the classroom blog called “Math Stuff” on edublogs where only my students will have access to them at their convenience. In addition to creating a video on my tablet for extra credit assignments, I will post links to videos on the classroom blog that my students will need to watch as part of future extra credit assignments. As of now, it is my plan to use these methods every week to help encourage my students to become more familiar with using videos and blogs in the math classroom.
In conclusion, there are many programs and websites that can be used to create and watch videos for educational purposes, but for my purposes, I plan to use edublogs as my main destination for video postings this year.
The idea of using the videos as extra credit is great! I had not thought of that before and for some reason students will put more energy into extra credit than they will their actual assignment. This would be a motivating factor for many of my students and posting them to the Edublogs is also convenient.
Casey
I also like your idea of using videos for extra credit! I think that helps keep things ‘fair’ since all students may not have access to the internet at home. I think that those students who actually do extra credit will be excited to do something like this!