Tuesday evening with Women of Web 2, yielded the usual rich chat room conversation and engaging speaker content. Colleen King a math teacher/consultant and the host of Math Playground talked about the Mathcast 500 Project. Her tagline rings true for me, “When students become teachers, learning become inevitable.” The Mathcast concept makes full use of Voicethreads technology. User friendly, this web-based teaching tool can turn students into effective peer teachers. This new project promises to become a repository of student created resources. I did some experimenting today and my students seem to be very receptive to recoding their reflections about math activities. I did run into a technical glitch. In some cases the recording cut off after only several seconds so I wasn’t able to complete the project. Here is an example of what some students created to explain how they use Rocket Math. If Voicethreads can be this effective for math, just imagine the numerous other ways it could be used by students to reinforce and extend learning. Colleen’s Math Playground is deep and wide. I plan to return regularly for the latest math tools.
Tags: colleen king, math playground, mathcasts 500, voicethreads, wiki
rippling pond 
December 9, 2007 at 9:29 am |
Hi Kathy,
Thank you for listening to the webcast. I’m really glad you see the value of student created mathcasts. It is my hope that students will solve he ready-made problems in the project then move on to create re personal mathcasts like the Rocket Math example you watched.
I have not experienced any recording issues with Voice Thread but will look into it. I hope it was a one time technical glitch. Please let me know if you continue to have problems.
If you are able to have your students record a Voice Thread, please let me know and I will feature it on Math Playground.