My Wife is Brilliant!

9/18/2005 11:16:00 am

On Friday I changed the RSS feed for the sidebar math resources from Maricopa's MLX to MERLOT's most recent math resources. Then I stumbled along this resource; a collection of short instructional math videos (about 5 to 10 minutes each) from the University of Idaho. Anyway, I found material relevant to all the classes I'm currently teaching and posted the resources to the classes (here, here and here) to learn from over the weekend. In my post I asked:

Let me know what you thought of the videos in the comments to this post. Did it help you learn? Is it clear and easy to follow? Should I post more of these? ;-)

My wife and I were discussing it this morning. I was thinking out loud about the value that students would get from this resource and shared with her this comment from one of them:

Factoring a trinomial part 2 is good for those who do not yet understand how to do a question like 3x2 + 14xy + 8y2 ..it helped me, er-- with the exception of much pause, rewind, playback, pause, rewind and etc hehe.

..long division of polynomials is just a pain in the ..head ^_^

"Wouldn't it be great," I said, "if students could do that to their teachers whenever they needed to? Pause, rewind, repeat. Pause, rewind, repeat ..." As we talked about it more she suggested that we create more of these instructional videos at our school. I immediately thought: "What a great topic for the next BPRIME workshop." As a staff we would decide on what videos we'd like to make, carefully script them so that they stay at around 10 minutes or less, and work together using a sort of lesson study format. I get very excited about stuff like this. ;-) I started going on about what a great professional development opportunity it would be for everyone who participated in it. At the same time we would be contributing to the international math community by making these videos freely available online. Maybe other schools would follow suit and we'd really have a fantastic international resource. The BPRIME Wiki could be a clearing house for all these resources!

When I finally took a breath, she turned to me and said: "I meant you should get the students to do it."

My wife is brilliant!

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Darren Kuropatwa

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3 comments

  1. Anonymous18/9/05 22:30

    Yes, she most certainly is. But she married well. Your students are visiting their class blogs at midnight on a weekend -- the chatboxes were very, very cool! What a community you're creating.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous19/9/05 16:42

    Very nice video, I use these in my Algebra 1 class:

    www.mymathtutor.com/members/algebra1

    JG

    ReplyDelete
  3. Amerloc20/9/05 15:59

    You both are.

    Yes, she is, for noting that the students should do it (for a number of sound educational motives).

    And yes, you are, for anticipating the benefits to your colleagues (again, a number of sound educational motives).

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