EduCreations - 7th Grade Math Final Project

As the school year is coming to a close I am in a mangled mess of deciding what to cover in the last few weeks as more and more school events take up partial days, half the class of students, and the students yearning for something new besides the same daily monotony of what has been nearly 9 months of math.

At this point we have finished all of the Oregon Standards and are lumping in CCSS standards that are not within the current 7th grade Oregon Standards. This includes things such as data and angles of lines.

For the last two weeks of the school year I am going to try a concluding project with my 7th grade math students. Reading a blog, I stumbled upon a professor and a student teacher discussing a problem a 2nd grade student was solving.  The problem was video taped and the writing was recorded using a Khan Academy Video type program called EduCreations.

The power of this video documenting the thought process is amazing!

Below is the video:


For my students project. I will have them work in pairs let them randomly draw a word problem of middle school content and explore or un-puzzle what it says on film why recording.

After the initial recording I am going to have them create another video depicting whether they were right or wrong, what they agree with, and if they went astray where and why.

I feel I also would like them to present these videos to the class with each student filling out a basic summary sheet as they watch. As I have learned this maybe a daunting task for many of them as they have little experience presenting in front of the class in this school district.  For student grading sheets while they watch, I am not quiet sure what this would look like, but would like to include key math words, how well did they attempt the problem, if they were stuck were they able to uncover their error in the follow up.... OR... perhaps just a simple check list of things I'd want to see.

So by the end of June I will report back on the project.