Rhodes to Wisdom

In my quest to create a self-paced maths course that enables students to work anywehere between VELS levels 2 to 5, I recently purchased a Wacom Bamboo tablet. I bought this because Salam Khan uses it to make his videos. Who is Salman Khan? Check out the video below.

This week in maths, we are looking at the rather unexciting topic of multiplying fractions. This corresponds to level 3.25 in number in the mathematics domain. However, I want my higher end grade sixes doing higher end work, so they are going to be dividing fractions, which corresponds to number level 4.25. I used my tablet, screencast-o-matic, my $8 headset from Big W and my homemade electronic fraction bars to make these two videos. They’re pretty dodgy, but I think if I can get my kids to do screencasts like this, where they actually articulate their thinking, they’ll come away with a deeper understanding of these two concepts than I ever developed in school (all I remember about dividing fractions was flipping the second one over and turning the division sign into a multiplication sign).