Math Video Lessons - Grant Funded Project for Middle School

This year I'll be working with Brenda June's 6th grade math classes to create video lessons. It's a plan I submitted in May as a proposal for a MACUL grant. I was excited to learn they accepted our proposal. Brenda and I started working with the classes last week.

I will be reporting regularly on the progress, so I won't go into great detail here. The basic idea of the grant is we will post several video lessons that have been created by me, Mrs. June and the students. In building our video portal site, we will also be developing a classroom brand.

The photo above shows the equipment we were able to purchase with the grant. We have two iPads along with tripods and mounts. We also got an iRig Studio microphone and a Dell Chromebook.

We will be using the Explain Everything app to record the tutorials and then edit in some standard bumpers to the beginning and the end uisng iMovie. We hope to incorporate live video in time too. Besides math videos, we will make some that feature growth mindset and study skill tips.

Last week we took two class periods to work on a very basic video lesson. We use the ShowMe app on the middle school's set of iPads. Normally we won't work with the whole class at one time as we create the videos, but we wanted everyone to see the process form start to finish. As we suspected, a lot of the lessons were rough, but I was very impressed with the students' excitement as they worked!

Next up, we will decide on a name for our video lessons and we will begin building the site for the portal. Brenda and I will get things rolling with a few lessons. We will start working with the first group of students soon.