My most exciting takeaway from the four Mobile Technologies workshops came from an anecdote that Andy Losik shared in the Advanced Tips and Tricks for Mobile Devices workshop. Andy shared an anecdote on how the app ShowMe got started simply by a 5th-grade teacher asking her students to solve one long division problem using their iPads and recording their thinking while solving.

I am 1:1 in my classroom with iPads, and we don’t have ShowMe, but we do have Educreations which is very similar. I have assigned my students five problems to complete. Each problem represents math content that we have covered in the first trimester of the school year.

 

Each problem would be a separate video that students create, approximately 3-5 minutes in length each. While they are solving it using the whiteboard app, they are also recording their thinking.

What is great about these videos is not only are they great formative assessments, they are also easily brought up and viewed within my Educreations login and are great artifacts to show parents at Parent-Teacher conferences.

 

I plan on doing this each trimester and continue the practice for years to come. It is so simple and yet so powerful.