Tried It Tuesday- Explain Everything

I'm linking up with Fourth Grade Flipper for her Tried it Tuesday!

We started a whole new math curriculum this year. My school has been Saxon for eons! (Well maybe not, but definitely a long time.) We were told that we could no longer be an exception school and all schools were to teach the district program. 

This has done a couple of things.

1. Frustrated students… 

They knew what to expect from Saxon and it was very direct. The new way of thinking is really confusing and frustrating them.

2. Frustrated parents… 

Some of our parents chose our school because they liked Saxon math. They don't understand this "new" way of thinking and aren't able to help their kids.

3. Frustrated teachers… 

We always scored at the top in our district and those that have been teaching Saxon knew it inside and out and already had all their differentiation ready to go. We also get to work with frustrated students that may or may not have horrible attitudes about the math due to things they are hearing.

These and a couple of factors led me to want to try a modified Flipped Classroom. It's not truly flipped because the students are watching the lesson videos in the classroom on their school iPads. (We are 1:1 in grades 3-5.) 

In the process of setting up the lesson videos, I tried a couple of different ways to make the make the videos. The first 4-5 are horrible, but they got us going. I will definitely need to redo them next year. I finally remembered about a fun app that I learned about in our Apple training when we got the iPads a couple of years ago.

Explain Everything

Cost $2.99

It has a lot of features and ways to annotate or draw attention to different area on the screen.

You can go back and edit annotating and sound. 

I'm still learning and getting better at this.

This was probably the best thing for me. 

It has a direct upload to YouTube! 

It also has other export options.

I still have a lot to learn about this app and working in a modified Flipped Classroom but I'll share what I learn as I go. 

Just as some extra information, my students have a Gaggle account. This gives them an email, access to assignments and a filtered YouTube. This is the work flow I plan to use to have my students watch the video. Today was day 1 of them trying to watch on the iPads. It did not go so well, but hopefully tomorrow will go better! 

Here is one of my most recent lessons.

Here is a link to my school website {here} which will eventually include all my 5th grade Go Math lessons.

Thanks for stopping by!

*Steph*