Everybody's a teacher...

There is nothing kids like better than showing off what they know. What better way to do that than through tutorials created by them!

The following is a guest post by  Kelly Wroblewski, a High School Math Teacher, written on the "ShowMe" blog

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Some of our students use the Khan Academy website as a resource to supplement in-class instruction, but some topics were either unavailable or were not tailored to our courses or textbooks. Mr. Kiker and I determined we could use the ShowMe app to create videos similar to those found on the Khan Academy website, but specific to our courses at Austin High. Rather than having students hear their teachers yet again in video, we decided to design a project where the students create the instructional materials. Since we were implementing this project towards the end of the school year, it provided the opportunity for students to review for the upcoming state exam or reflect upon a specific topic from the school year, depending on the needs for that course.

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She makes a great point that the students were creating materials for future classes that did not exist before and were reviewing and gaining a deeper understanding of the concepts in the process.

The following is in a website format, but the students are required to watch and comment on each others' videos.

http://www.carlisleschools.org/webpages/wolfer/videos.cfm?subpage=897997

Middle school students get in on the action as well:
The http://www.mathtrain.com/ website includes class links, a blog and a link to a student created video tutorial site http://mathtrain.tv/.

I have already started having my 8th graders create various technology video tutorials using Quicktime's screencasting tools and iMovie or GarageBand.  My original thought was to create a website this summer with all of these video, but I think I need to expand that to include a blog for students to share their knowledge with others!

Dictating a Blog

my first post for this blog is an experiment. I am attempting to write my photo blog postwith the speech to text app on my phone.as you can tell some of the words don't come out quite right. return returnand I can't seem to figure out how to make a

except of course when I attempted to use the word new paragraph.  since this is an experiment designed to help students who might not be able to type on their own I have renamed my blog  .the title comes from a quotation that is attributed 2 I'm Stein.the previous should have read Albert Einstein.the quotation have to do with the fact that if you expect a fish to climb a tree the fish will live its life thinking its stupid. According to the quote investigatorthis does not come from Albert Einstein but rather from an allegory buy an education author:who wrote in the late 18 hundreds. I still adore the quotation. I often tell my students that some of them won't be good at computers, but it doesn't matter because they are good at other things. I use this quotation to explain myself.  I do explain to them know that sometimes I will need them to climb that tree.  we talked about building them little environmental suits so that they can climb the tree.

Once when I was discussing this, a student looked at me and said couldn't we just plant the tree under water.  and this is why we need to listen to our students.

** Typed notation: I decided not to edit this when I was done. For those of you working with older student with educational challenges - would this get them far enough so that they could edit and make it readable?  For those of you working with younger students - would this be readable without editing?
The website for the Quote Investigator is http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/06/fish-climb/ (This particular article is quite interesting - all about teaching children in a way they can learn.)