Tried It Tuesday: Educreations

What a day it has been! One day I will get this whole blog planning thing under control, but until then I will wait until my daughter goes to bed to write about what's going on in my classroom!  It's Tuesday and that means it's time to link up with Holly over at Fourth Grade Flipper for

I'm super excited to share what I "tried" today my students!

I'm also linking up with Technology Tailgait for Techie Tuesday

I've written a few times about the math training that I have been attending for the past two years, Extending Children's Mathematics (CGI for grades 3-6).  One key when teaching using the CGI method is sharing strategies and using the kids strategies as the teaching models.  I was trying to figure out a way for my kids to all be able to share and to put our laptops to good use at the same time.  A fellow 21C grant participant told me about Educreations. Educreations is basically an online whiteboard that will record what you write and say as you write and say it.  

So after reading a little about the website, I went and set up an account - super easy! One important thing you need to make Educreations work for you is a set of headphones with a microphone so your voice gets recorded clearly.  I asked my principal really nicely at the beginning of the year if there was any money for headphones with microphones for my students to use with their laptops... and low and behold some money magically appeared!  I got a great deal for a class set of headphones and they work perfect with Educreations! They look like they are in some of kind of mission control!

The way I use Educreations is that I give my students a problem to solve.  Today's problem was "Mrs. Elliott travels a lot for work.  She traveled 1,266 miles each month for 4 months.  How many miles did Mrs. Elliott travel at the end of the 4 months?"  My students first solved this problem the old fashioned way on paper and pencil marker (so I can truly see all of their work).  

When they finish, then they log onto Educreations and recreate their work with their explanation of their thinking. They can erase and record as they need to until they are satisfied with their work.  

Here is a link to one of their recordings! We are working on trying to figure out a way to cut out all of the background noise!

We tried using it a couple of weeks ago and had a lot of issues with our recordings not saving.  It appears that Educreations and Google Chrome do not get along very well.  We used plain old Internet Explorer today and we had no issues!  The kids absolutely love it!  When they finished recording their strategy, they then went and created a new blog post with a link to their recording.  Their peers could then watch their strategy and comment on the post about what they thought, ask questions, or say "Hey, you solved this problem just like me!"  

My next plan is us this tool as a way to help parents understand how we are solving multiplication and division problems the "Common Core Way".  I'm hoping that doing so will answer a lot of the questions my parents have!