Our maths videos for teachers

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In the context of a numeracy programme (in sub-Saharan Africa) we had a conversation a few days ago, that reminded me of the videos that we produced for OER4Schools, now almost 10 years ago. We recently migrated the OER4Schools wiki, and it’s available here https://oer.opendeved.net. We’re still working on it, so it’s not perfect, but getting there.

Here are some quick notes on the OER4Schools videos

  1. All videos are ‘naturalistic’ – they don’t have narrative and [purport to] have ‘linear time’ (though in reality, they combine many takes etc).
  2.  Teachers would encounter a video in a teacher group meeting, which has a semi-scripted plan, e.g., https://oer.opendeved.net/wiki/OER4Schools/What_is_interactive_teaching
  3. The video is also available separately, together with questions for reflection:https://oer.opendeved.net/wiki/Video/Eness_vertebrates_1.mp4

We do not see these videos as demonstrations, but as stimulus for reflection. This has been spectacularly effective among teachers who ‘know theoretically how they should teach’ but haven’t got expertise in how to do this. So – in a few words – teachers are very quick to criticise Eness for the clip above. However, they then usually reflect very quickly that actually, they do not try any engaging teaching in their classroom; at least Eness was trying. Also, the lesson picks up later, with very good group discussion; this also makes the point that different parts of the lesson are at different paces.

As the wiki is creaking a bit, here are the most maths-relevant video(-sequences) via YouTube:

The last three videos were produced together with AIMS-SEC (South Africa). These are the main ones we have on maths, we do have others on science subjects. Research on the OER4Schools programme is collated here: https://docs.opendeved.net/lib/?featured=PJBQVYMS&sort=date_desc.

Stay tuned for more maths updates!

Image by Elf-Moondance from Pixabay

Björn Haßler
Björn Haßler