One thing I love about attending conferences is that the take-aways can be reshaped and refined in to fit into my own style of teaching. When I was participating in a session on Qualitative Formative Assessment with the Explain Everything co-creator Reshan Richards I was struck by 100% pure fun of creating a Brady Bunch screencast. I was teaching a really dry concept in Algebra II this week but we were able to stir things up a bit with a screen cast. First I made my students find the Brady Bunch theme song and I asked them how the images in the credits were related to math. They were able to recognize the three by three pattern. Next I told them that I wanted to them to draw a similar nine box pattern on their screencasting APP. There are five different ways that you can solve a quadratic equation, they had to look up the 5 different methods and import visuals of each method into their screencast. The remaining four boxes in the screencast were left for three pictures of classmates and one picture of me.
Obviously I can’t show an example with real pictures because that would be unethical to show my students faces. However, I can tell you that the tic-tac-toe board format of introducing kids to new information when they make their own screencast is an effective instructional strategy. Thanks to Reshan for the creative inspiration. Thanks to my students for their imaginative math minds as we told the story of the Pepe Bunch: the best bunch of math students a teacher could hope for…
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