Explore, Understand, Represent and Communicate

(www.explainingunderstanding.com)

Tim Pelton & Leslee Francis Pelton  
(tpelton@uvic.ca lfrancis@uvic.ca)
University of Victoria

NCTM – New Orleans – April 11, 2014

Expand the educational potential of iPads with a creative app like ‘Explain Everything’. In this presentation we explain and share our free collection of teacher created interactive projects and video demonstrations designed to support discovery and sense-making in math.  We encourage participants to adopt this tool in their practice. Take it to the next level by challenging students to demonstrate their mastery by creating similar resources.

Some context:

iPads (or Tablets) have many different powerful potentials (for both learners and educators)

• Content Conveyors (text, video, etc)
• Exploration Environments (manipulatives, widgets, challenges)
•  Data Collectors (camera, video, audio, sensors, notes, assessment)
• Consolidation Tutors (games, practice tutorials)
• Communication Devices (mail, social media, synchronous)
•  Creation Studios (images, videos, podcasts, learning objects)
• Presentation Tools (pdf, web, document camera)

Screencast apps on tablets support all of these potentials:

More specifically you can:

• Access examples of virtual manipulatives generated by others (educators, etc.) to support exploration 
• Generate virtual manipulatives to support explorations by your students
• Capture performances for sharing, review and assessment
• Generate interactive projects/contexts/challenges to guide student discovery
•  Publish links to resources for home based review/exploration/discussion
• Access demonstration videos – generated by others (educators, etc.) to support understanding
•  Generate educational videos to efficiently share your best ideas/demonstrations with your class (you do it once or twice and your class and others repeatedly benefit)
• Encourage students to master topics as they create, generate and communicate new concepts, models and manipulatives.
• Support collaboration as educators work together to create, evaluate and refine resources
• Contribute to a wider collection of free learning resources by sharing your manipulatives, projects, videos etc.

The Explain Everything tool:

The features of this tool allow you to:

• Create – lines, text, objects, slides
•  Import – images, videos, webpages
• Manipulate – duplicate, rotate, scale, layer, lock,
• Record – animation, voice, together or separate
• Share – projects, images, videos

Examples to Share:

 Note that although we selected Grades 6-8 as the focus grade range for this presentation, we believe that this type of tool is useful in a broader range of classrooms and share some resources with this in mind. 

Some Manipulatives:

·      Coins (Canadian)

·      Draw-it

·      Pattern Blocks

·      Triangle Sorter

·      Aqua Glyph

·      Mystery Number

·      Fraction Strips and Bars

·      Fraction Multiplication

·      Order of Operation Activity
·     Ratio Heads

·      Integer Chips

·      Function Machine

Use these and the recording function to capture and assess student mastery:

·      Can you make $3.67 (3 ways)?

·      Show me 1/4 + 2/3 = ? (with fraction strips)

Demonstrating how might you create/modify/expand and export a manipulative (in live presentation):

·      Expand fraction strips  (3x and tape)

Some videos:

·      Divisible by 3

·      Add Fractions

·      Product of Integers

·      Proportion

Demonstrating how you might create a video (in live presentation)

·      Triangle sum

Questions?   Thoughts?   Suggestions?