Whight’s view on technology, maths and education.

While searching external bloggers I came across an interesting blog by an Instructional Technologist at a US School. It mentioned an interesting technology called Sketchcast and the potential to use this program to create tutorials for students and parents.

Whilst this site apparently allowed you to create sketchcasts, it doesn’t appear to be working at the moment. For those interested in learning more, see the following tutorial on how to create a sketchcast using a range of desktop and internet applications. The key to creating a sketchcast is having a mic, a screen recording tool and a sketching pallat, the most basic of which I can think of is Paint.

Anyway, I think this idea could be useful in a classroom. We could use it as a teacher directed aid, however to be more beneficiall to our students, we could get our students to create there own. This could take the form of an overview of a topic or as a solution to a question, as suggested by the blogger. In this way the technology would be implemented using a constructionist approach to learning. This is underpinned by Pappert’s theory that students learn best when they are the designer and builder, as discussed by Harel.

Whilst a true sketchcast involves a sketching pallet, I do not see why this idea cannot be extended to include recordings of software such as Geogebra that will allow more complex ideas to be examined. See my amateurish version below on constructing an angle in a semicircle using geogebra. This was created using Geobra and Debut Video Capture Software.

Note: For a true sketchcast  I should also record sound to explain what I am doing. 

Note: If you can’t see the embedded video below (I couldn’t see it), see it on YouTube.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS