Teaming up with Math Playground & Students Showing the Way

December 14th, 2007

We’re very excited to share that Math Playground (a phenomenal resource for students and teachers created by Colleen King) has partnered with us on our K-7 Mathcasts 500 Project.

This means that lots of students, educators, parents and others have not only discovered our project but that they’re starting to add their voices and writing too.

Students showing the way

The K-7 Mathcasts 500 Project is a collaborative work in progress meaning that we’re looking for many more students (and some educators) to contribute their voices and writing to it.

A number of 5th grade students from the South Paris Collaborative figured this out after their teachers, Lisa Parisi and Christine Southard, found our project through Colleen’s Math Playground and got them started working adding their voices & writing.

Here are a couple of VoiceThreads that they’ve added their voices to. We hope you’ll be inspired by them and contribute to this ongoing project. South Paris Collaborative also has a new mathcasts portfolio page on our wiki.

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What is a mathcast?

December 2nd, 2007

Good question!

Mathcasts are screencasts (screen movies) of writing with voice that focus on mathematics. It’s easier to understand what mathcasts are all about if you experience one or more of them:

Here’s a mathcast by Colleen King, math teacher and creator of Math Playground?. It’s part of the K-7 Mathcasts 500 Project (500+ mathcasts for Kindergarten - 7th grade math) on our Math247 wiki.

This mathcast was created using VoiceThread, a graphics tablet, and a microphone.

A huge thank you goes to Sol Lederman of Wild About Math! (a great blog for math enthusiasts and would-be math enthusiasts) for blogging about mathcasts, honoring my long work in this area, and for sharing how to embed VoiceThreads in WordPress blogs (see the plug-in for Voicethread which is here. Sol discovered it at this blog article: Getting Voicethread and Wordpress to play nicely).

Posted in Mathcasts | 3 Comments »