Making Time with Educreations!

A teacher's number one phrase = "There's never enough time." When I was in the classroom, I always felt there was never enough time. As a coach, I KNOW there is never enough time, but I sympathize with teacher's in my building as they try to get through everything and time gets in the way.

Two weeks ago, I had a teacher come to me with a math concern. Her students needed to get started with double-digit multiplication, but after giving the pre-test, she realized that they didn't even know how to add double-digit numbers. The concern was not only the fact that her students weren't where they should be, but the time crunch of getting everything in that needs to be done by the end of the first quarter.

There's so much to get through in one day! If only we could add a few more hours. So after some brainstorming, we decided that maybe we could "flip" math. Out of about 20 students, only 4-5 had an understanding of double-digit addition with regrouping. I think this caused the "time crunch" panic of "I have so much to get to and its going to take forever to get to where we need to be." So I made a goal that it would take no more than a week for the students to gain mastery and I started to plan.

Because its the beginning of the year, I did consider the "summer loss." So I decided to use Educreations to create a re-teaching instructional video to use as morning work. It was my first experience of actually creating a video myself. Tip: make sure your kids are asleep! I definitely had to stop numerous times because of my son talking. Thank goodness for Educreations' updates and the undo button. I tried to make the video personal and talk to the students. I started with a good morning and shared our objectives.  Check out my video here.  The students also had a quick check sheet to work out their problems along with me. We did the sample together in the video and then they tried 2 problems on their own as a pre-test for me. I wanted to analyze the common mistakes and misunderstandings.

Common mistakes and misunderstanding: place value understanding, what to do when the answer in the tens column is more than 9, regrouping in general, lining up of numbers

I entered the class first thing in the morning. I gave a short intro to what we would be doing and why. My video was about 7 minutes long. Let me tell you....that was the most quiet 7  minutes I've ever experienced. The students were engaged in the video. The end of the video told them what to do next so I never had to personally tell the students what to do next. I could just see them going through the steps and it was awesome. I thought of how beneficial that would be to overall time as a teacher. I thought about how it could allow a teacher to pull intervention groups as students worked. I was never interrupted while that instructional video was playing. It was just plain awesome!

If you would like to see how the lesson played out and next steps (small group instruction involving QR codes), feel free to make a comment! I also made my goal of mastery within a week. It only took 3 days and ended with the students making their own instructional videos on Educreations to show double- digit addition with regrouping. They even created a success criteria list for themselves to assess their own Educreations instructional video. It created time during the math block for small group instruction to meet the needs of all students. The re-teaching and pretesting was already done as morning work so we were able to use that data to guide small group time during the math block.

Here are some tips on creating instructional videos that I think helped with the success of mine with students:

1. Be personal
2. Encourage the students
3. Have them complete tasks along with you on the video (it helps with engagement)
4. Share objectives, expectations, and goals
5. Be clear in your explanations
6. Leave time for students to practice and self check during the video (the students loved hearing whether they got the answer right and were allowed to give themselves a smiley face)
7. Talk clearly with good volume
8. Let the students explore Educreations themselves
9. Have fun and be creative!

My video was very simple and the kids watched my video over and over when they were creating their own. Beginning of the year success story #1.

Educreations = Just Plain Awesome!

P.S. Because we are a 1:1 iPad school, we used the app. Educreations is also a web-based tool. It can work in any classroom.

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