Mathcasts.org — student-developed screencasts

Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed provides a commentary and pointer to Mathcasts.org, “…a wiki that is collecting examples of student produced screencasts about math related topics” (Weblogg-ed description).

One of the interesting links on the wiki is to the Whiteboard Movie Making Book book by Tim Fahlberg, Linda Fahlberg-Stojanovska, and Graeme MacNeil.

Like Will, I really like the idea of student-driven, student produced work. Nothing quite like peer examples to inspire others. I can see an excellent tie-in with e-portfolios – a way for students to demonstrate that they understand a subject. In UBC’s context, this makes me think of our LEAP project – – particularly the online tutoring component.

The Student Society at UBC, the AMS, offers tutoring – and over the past year, in conjunction with the LEAP partners, including the OLT, has been developing out online tutoring. We’ve had some challenges with graphical tools for things like Math and Chemistry. I can see developing some screencasts as a nice complement to the live tutoring. The tutors themselves may be able to use this method to demonstrate their abilities by creating some of these (particularly if they have an e-portfolio).

Hmm.. more interesting, perhaps, would be to have this as part of student tutor training. Even if they never published them, they could practice their tutoring by stepping through problems. Plus they will have picked up some good technology skills. Very cool.

I can see this extended beyond math into chemistry and other subjects like this really easily.

This site is a treasure trove for faculty as well. We all struggle with the “how-to” pieces of our teaching. Kind of interesting how the technology is bringing us back to capturing the dynamic nature (and I am not being sarcastic) of the chalkboard and/or overhead projector.

Hmm, looks like a new workshop in the making for an upcoming e-learning institute…

Back to vacation….

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