Watch our class do long division!

Today I'm doubling my tech link up with Techie Turtle Teacher for Tech Tip Tuesday and Teaching Trio for Tech Thursday to share my love for educreations! Educreations is an iPad app that is basically a virtual white board. You can draw/write on the board and add images and text as it records your voice. I have used it in the past to create video math lessons that I post on my class blog for parents. (Check them out here!) During fall conferences parents expressed concern that they were unable to help their children on math homework using new common core strategies. Educreations helped me take care of that problem!

My class has been working on long division for some time and they are still struggling to remember the steps to solving the problem. I was about to post an educreations lesson so parents could help out at home when it dawned on me... Why not have the kids create their own video lessons!!! So today I brought in the iPads, gave the kids a quick tutorial, and sent them on their merry way. The results were nothing short of epic!

Here is the video lesson we created as whole class example:



And here is a video two of my students created:
(They used the mnemonic device learned in class Dangerous Monkeys Swipe Bananas to remind them to Divide, Multiply, Subtract, and Bring down.)

I feel that after completing this project my students have a better grasp on long division. However, we still have some work to do... I played the videos back for the class and students saw a few mistakes they had made. Usually when we are working with pencil and paper I find it difficult for some students to show their work. But, by narrating each step as they created their video lessons they were able to see exactly where the mistake was.

Accounts on educreations are free (though there are a few features only available with a pro plan starting at $11.99/month). I'm working with my class on the basic free plan. If your interested in trying this out in your own classroom, here are a few pointers:

And here is just one more cool resource for long division. This video comes from PBS Learning Media, which has a wealth of digital resources for just about any topic you can imagine. This video is part of the Math at the Core: Middle School collection. It highlights both the standard form of long division the more common core way using place value.

I hope you find these tools useful in your classroom! Have a great end to your week :)