Last spring, at the tail end of my first year of teaching, I was pondering how to make my math classroom more engaging. I wanted to make the math more meaningful for students (an almost universal desire among teachers, I think). Don’t get me wrong, we had done math application problems, in the form of word problems. However, I felt that there needed to be something more.
I attended a county Common Core mathematics workshop in April, focused on helping teachers develop strategies for teaching the eight math practices. At lunch, the workshop head played this Dan Meyer bean counting video for us to think about. A few days later, a colleague of mine, Ben Rimes, started posting his first video problems. I finished the school year using a few of these videos in my classroom, and really saw a higher level of engagement and curriculum relevance.
This current school year, I have made math video problems a large part of the classroom. I have produced many videos that have served as instructional pieces. Furthermore, I have had students develop video problems of their own. I will go into the process of both the teacher-created and student-created videos in separate blog posts in the near future.
For now, I just wanted to share the resources that have been created this year. Ben created and managed a Video Story Problem channel on Vimeo, where several teachers have collaborated to create a collection of these videos.
I will post later this week, more specifically about the teacher and student video process.
Also, I will be speaking at MACUL about my experience with these videos, for those who are interested.