Article 2 Media II

This article describes research on student (collegiate level) produced screencasts to explain concepts in year 4 to 9 level of mathematics and their impact on the students own teaching and learning.  The screencasts are meant to stay away from the procedural like Khan Academy and be used as a tool for reflective learning.  A student pointed out that it would be a great advantage to send their professor or tutor a podcast of where they were getting stuck so the professor could help them from where they were stuck.  

Students didn’t all have the readily available resources to do this and were not all willing to expose their incomplete knowledge so the researchers provided the material to the students.  Participants were asked to use the borrowed digital device to create a screencast about a troublesome mathematical concept, discuss the development of the concept, and include video of them actually solving the problem.  Students commented how screencasts were not very personal and you miss the interaction of the class with things like facial expressions which also communicate information.  When the students first created their screencasts they noticed their misuse of terminology when explaining their work.  Through their reflections on the screencasts, students pointed out how much more comfortable they were when the recorder started with admitting that they struggled through the concept at first.  It helped them not feel inadequate.  When making the screencasts, they point out how it was very different when they had to speak the math out loud instead of just reading it.  Students who did not participate in the screencast noted that they were afraid not of the math writing part but the talking part.  The researcher is hoping to redo this study in the future and provide more instruction and a rubric to the students to help them with their work.

I found it great to see some very introductory research on the use of screencasts.  It was good to hear a lot of the student’s reactions to creating the screencasts in the research.  This made me realize that having students create their own screencasts or videos of mathematical concepts can help greatly in their understanding.  Many students can Nike ‘just do it’ the math but have a very difficult time verbalising what they are doing.  Here is where the students gain the most recognition and understanding of concepts they thought they understood well enough.  

This research has encouraged me to move forward with having students create a screencast of some sort to explain concepts they have learned from a particular unit.  I can split the class evenly amongst the units and have them do one screencast for one topic in the semester to start.  Once these are created, I hope to create a student-created database of ‘how to’ screencasts so they can hear them from the words of their classmates.  I think this can be very powerful, we shall see.

Galligan, L., & Hobohm, C. (2013). Students using digital technologies to produce screencasts

that support learning in mathematics. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the

Mathematics Education Research Group of Australasia (MERGA), Retrieved from

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED572864.pdf