Kids teaching Kids: Empowering Students Through Screencasting

Thursday, July 17th
Curtis and I went to hear Eric Marcos and two of his students show the power of screencasting. He spoke about how intrigued students were by this new tool, often hovering over the Tablet PC in a semi-circle. Class participation improved dramatically and he reminded us to actually "let the kids touch the computer."

One of his students told the audience that "kids learn better from kids because teachers think a different way."

Tools needed are simple:

• Tablet PC or Wacom tablet
• Microphone
• Software: Camtasia Studio, Jing, VoiceThread, Tux Paint or Screencast-o-matic

Benefits of students creating mathcasts are:

• Take an active role in their own learning
• Have fun
• Unscripted
• Authentic assessment
• Student-created
• Kids teaching kids

Eric has created a Web site called mathtrain.com. This is a relaly useful site that is math video lessons by and for middle school students. Powered by Moodle, this interactive site offers homework help, student collaboration, forums/blogs, and a messaging system.

Once your mathcasts are created, they can be shared with your own class, the rest of the school, or the global community. You can export them to:

• mathtrain.tv
• screencast.com
• iTunes
• YouTube/TeacherTube
• Google Video (can add closed captioning)

Curtis is enthusiastic to try this as a teaching tool in class, but would want to encourage kids to provide more detail in their explanations than we saw in the student demo.