I remember in grad school one of my professors telling me, “You don’t really know a concept well until you teach it to others.” This is an idea that stuck with me throughout my teaching career. It is the whole notion of making the students the teachers – pushing kids into the creating phase of Bloom’s taxonomy, and also kicking it up a notch when they are teaching an audience the concept. Above all, equipping the students with the tech tools of Doceri and screencasting, the students are given a venue to teach others as well. It has given the opportunity for all students to become a reviewable, rewindable, and some-what anonymous teacher for both their classmates and a larger audience as well.

Enter Ms. Carey’s fifth grade class in Salinas, CA, a 1-1 class full of iPads and the power of Doceri. On November 3rd, Ms. Carey and I decided to have students participate in a Doceri Math Film Festival with the grand prize of being featured on Coach Ben’s Youtube Channel.

The Game Plan

In groups of 3, students were tasked to make a 3-5 minutes video as a team that reviewed one of the Math concepts that they had learned so far. Students were to make a screencast with a title slide, an objective, an example, and a credit slide. First, student’s brainstormed a list of all the math concepts they had learned so far. In groups of 3, each group chose a topic they felt comfortable teaching and screencasting. Then, they had had to work together and plan their screencast. Finally, they began their presentations in class. A few weeks later, the official film festival took place. Students took notes, and gave feedback to their peers, and in the end the winners were given the “Oscar.” The winners are posted here.

Post Game

Ms. Carey and myself were happy with the overall results of student learning. We viewed this as a type of pre-assessment of screencasting skills. Students had some previous knowledge of Doceri from 4th grade. However, at the start of this year, students have been given little instruction on screencasting. Our plan is to do a few more film festivals throughout the year to measure growth, review key math concepts, and give students a chance to become the teacher.  At the end of this assignment, we asked students what they had learned from screencasting. Below are their responses:

Student Responses:

Alondra: I learned that working with other people is better than yourself only. I also learned how fun it is to make videos with other people.

Diana: I learned to work in a team. It was fun. It was more like a review of everything that we have done in math.

Jacob: I learned how to work better with peers.

Brandon: What I learned from the film festival was that you have to aline the decimals on all problems,which are multiplying,adding,subtracting and dividing.And all the ways you can do that.

Stephanie: Making the video was a pretty simple and quick, but showing it on the board was difficult. 1 classmate made me feel better by saying they didn’t really see anything wrong, but I still thought I could improve. While making the video I learned how to explain my topic much better than I used to. The video improved my explaining skills slightly.

Jesus: What I learned is that I need to do it more correctly.

Jenna: What I think I learned from the video were just about all we learned this year and more information and better understanding, and what I learned from making the video was a better way to make a video and even my example gave me a better understanding.

Natalia: What I learned about the math videos is that there is to many ways to solve a problem!!!!!!!!!!