Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Jing and Mathtrain



Prezi was fun for explaining division, but maybe a little cumbersome for a first foray into having students teach students.  I was looking for another multimedia method, and voila, learned about Jing in my 21st Century Technology Leadership Class.

Jing is a free application that allows you to take simple screenshots of your computer or to make very quick and easy screencasts.  One person who is a master at this is Eric Marcos, who teaches 6th grade at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, California and is a founder of Mathtrain.  We all know that in order to teach math well, you really need to understand it well.  Eric capitalizes on this and has his students explain math concepts for other students, then Eric records them and posts them on his website using Jing.  You can see their story here. These mini-videos are really engaging and you can access them for free here.  There is even a free Mathtrain Ipad app that you can download, available here.

In the interest of jumping in and trying all things ed tech, I tried a similar screencast using Jing and Paintbrush2 on my MacBook.  It was remarkably easy and you can see my very first attempt here.  I anticipate that the students will love doing this in computer lab with our PC Paint program and Jing, and if all goes well, we can have math help available on line, just like Eric Marcos

2 comments:

  1. Cool ... another new program to play with!

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  2. Thanks Duncan! I'm sure your mom would be happy to help you make screencasts for your blog.

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