The Power of the Sticky Note...

Last Friday, I sat in on the annual Manaikalani Hui. One of the items that we watched during the day was the Digital Immersion programme for teachers who are in the first year of working in a 1 to 1 classroom environment. They had been making videos about their teaching as enquiry journeys, using sticky notes as a method to cover the content in a step by step way. Thanks to +Fiona Grant for pointing me in the direction of her blog post about this.

I decided to have a go, as I happened to have a box full of LOADS of sticky notes,  and I decided to use my lovely Year 10 maths class as experimental subjects.
I didn't make one in advance and decided on having my first go in front of the whole class, so they could see the process and stuffing it up half way through was not the end of the world.
We had just been solving equations in algebra, so the topic for the movie was to explain how to do this.

Here is my video. Not too bad for holding my phone with one hand and driving the sticky notes with the other hand.




I got the students to work in pairs so they could rely on each other for maths knowledge and for understanding what they were doing.

Listening to the conversations while they worked was fascinating. They were talking about the Maths and working out how to break it down between them.
Arguing over who was going to do the voice over was common and one team got round that by typing in their explanation into their chrome book and getting it to speak!!

What was interesting to watch was the process. A couple of tries was needed, showing me in between times to see how they were doing. One team got confused with their voice over twice, so I decided on the second attempt that the feedback would not come from me but from the rest of the class. I played it to them all with the instructions for "constructive feedback ". They were good at that and could see where the explanation needed changing to make it make sense.

Here is the link to their blog, so you can see their completed movies, and some photographs of the process. I love the fact that some teams have found their own way of doing it and not just blindly copied mine and I also love how much Maths literacy was having to happen to accomplish this.